Does this look too digital?
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@heidigfx Right! I keep forgetting I use textures like that :)_
I'll try that once I'm near the end of my whole process.
I've tried using textures with layer modes in the past (waaaaay back when I was starting digital) but I could never make it look natural. It always looked kind of tacked on when I tried it.
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Awesome advice, thank you
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@art-of-b less is more
when it comes to textures, lowering the opacity of the texture layer can help. Use a mask and erase some of the texture to confine it to a certain area. Your work is amazing, we're talking specific style now, you got this... i don't need reassuring 
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Wonderful image: characters, shapes, line quality: all awesome!
Iād recognize it as digital because of the regularity of the texture...but Iām not sure everybody would. I do digital art exclusively, so I know how the brushes look like and recognize them when I see them.
Applying overlay textures is a common way of avoiding that and I do it myself. An excellent source of textures is Textures.com. You need an account, but after you login you can download up to 16 mid-res textures for free per day. If you want high res, you need to pay something, but mid-res is often enough. Another source I found recently is called PixelSurplus. ItĀ“s a marketplace, so you buy the files, but there are quite a few freebies and thereĀ“s a guy there who specializes on textures.
Applied textures have a problem though: they donāt follow the forms, so they donāt really look as if they were made by hand. I can definitely recognize them too, though itās not so easy if itĀ“s done well.
The best approach to avoid the ādigital lookā for me is to use highly textured brushes that have an inbuilt texture āvarianceā in their stroke. Many of KyleĀ“s brushes are like that, so I tend to use them exclusively. Also avoiding to āclean upā too much - leave the edges a bit irregular, leave the pencil strokes partly visible, etc...
There are other tricks with colors and process, but maybe the subject of another post! -
@smceccarelli which are some of your favorite Kyle Brushes?
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Thank you for the advice. I'll be sure to check out textures.com
One of the problems I have is that I use Painter, and instead of building paper texture into the brush it applies a paper texture to the whole canvas. This is cool in some ways, but in others it's frustratingly regular.
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@chip-valecek Took a screenshot of my "fav" folder
I use these for 99% of my art.
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@eric-castleman I thought your āmusicā entry was watercolor! How did you achieve that texture digitally? I will be first in line to buy one of your books when you are publishedājust Love your work.
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@eric-castleman This is really excellent advise. Im still working on texture myself.
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@bichonbistro Thanks for the nice compliments. I use a lot of texture, and I do not use many tools to paint faster. I treat it like a piece of paper, and limit myself to using basic brushes for painting, and for the details I use the basic pencil. I think the trick is that when I use texture I try my best to be spontaneous. One thing traditional has over digital are the accidents that come with it, such as not being able to control the water flow completely when doing watercolor painting, as well as exactly how each brush stroke will look when painting with oils. So when I drop in texture, I try my best to turn off my brain and just go with it. I start warping the scanned image without much thought, and when something clicks I stop, and I try to make sense of it.
