Hey, man!

How long have you been drawing for?
Additionally, where are you from?

Heya! I've been drawing for about 7 years now, but only really started taking it seriously about a couple years ago. And currently, i'm living in Finland. Gonna get cooold!

I'm learning how to draw myself. How often do you practice?

Also, nice! I'd love to visit Finland someday, I'm from Portugal so the weather and landscapes are very different from Finland's.

Ay, that's lovely! Well, i don't actually have a schedule for drawing practice, but i try to do something as often as i can. Even if it's just a small sketch in one day. I rarely ever have those really fulfilling days of good practice, so doing smol little things almost every day just helps me keep some fundamental skills from getting rusty. But yeah, of course, this isn't the only way to do it; an interesting way to practice would be to do really thorough practice every weekend, and not draw during weekdays, so it depends a lot on what works for each person's schedule and preference.

And look at that! A Portuguese fur! I've been to Lisbon a few times, really lovely place! And best wishes with your art practice. Looking at your gallery, you really have some lovely ideas ^^

Yeah, having a regular practice schedule is also pretty difficult for me ^^; what with work, family and whatever else has priority. I'm going with the same "as often as I can" method.

Awesome! I used to live there a few years back when I was in college.

And thanks, I'm glad you enjoy my gallery, I certainly enjoy yours as well! :)

Hey-ho! I've recently stumbled upon your art and I have to say that I love the evolution over the years! I especially adore the painterly style of your most recent pieces. I've been trying to learn how to paint in that style but I've hit a pretty hard wall recently and so I wanted to ask you a question.

In the past, you've said that you use Krita so I was wanted to ask which brushes you used? Further, I also wanted to ask, how did you go about leaving such painterly strokes? Things like little smudges of different colors showing through really adds to the character of the painting. Did you go about it with flats then used multiply layers or did you go straight into color?

I do apologize if my bombardment of questions may be annoying and I know that it may be a faux-pas to some, but I truly am curious about it. Thank you for your time and the opportunity to ask you questions, and I wish you a great day!

Heyy, thank you!! The brushes i usually use are actually really simple, where the brush tip is just a simple shape, like a square or a rectangle, with only a bit of texture variation. The brushes themselves are often set up so that each stroke has a bit of random saturation and hue variation (using Fuzzy Dab, where the variation is from -3% to +3% give or take). That just adds a really small color variation that makes things feel a bit more natural. For more painterly brushes, the brush tip is really simple to make: just a bunch of blurry dots (Usually around 30 of them just by eyeballing it. Too many would make the brush strokes messy) scattered in some arbitrary shape. And then, when using that tip in a brush, i just enable "Sharpness" in the brush settings and edit the pressure curve, to essentially sharpen the edges of those blurry dots, and have them grow with more pressure. That way, you can replicate, to an extent, the effect of bristles pushing at the canvas at varying pressure.

Though, in the end, i rarely end up using painterly brushes if not only on finishing touches. They're really slow for Krita to process, and, also, the amount of sharp details that they have can be pretty distracting. This is why my second to most used brush these days has barely any color variation, has no texture overlays, and its tip is really just a long rectangle with one softer end and one harder end. It's fast to process and pretty easy to work with, since all the strokes are predictable. And the brush i use the most is just a pretty standard hard round brush. Just gotta make sure the flow varies with pressure, and gabaam xP

The way i work is in one layer. I do duplicate that layer several times as i work, in case i wanna go back to a previous iteration. This is by no means the correct way of working, and i do actually recommend taking advantage of layers instead. It's just that, in this workflow, i simply just use the more painterly brushes i have to directly add the more painterly details on top of everything. Often times, i go ahead and even "erase" some more unimportant parts of the drawings by just painting over them with a flat color, before going over them with the fancier brushes and partially recreating those details with a much heavier painterly texture to them.

A lot of this is preeeetty surperfluous though xD. I'm still really exploring different workflows, and my visualization skills are pretty poopy, so i tend to go over the same part of a drawing over and over again until i'm happy with it. So there's a lot of improving i really need to do here. But yeah, hopefully this wasn't too much to read! Feel free to ask if you got more questos, by the way!

No worries! Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions in such a brief time! In all honesty, in some small degree, I didn't think that someone would check journals often. Further, many people find it a bother to answer these kinds of questions, so I am thankful for your answers.

Regarding layers, I understand how it feels! I sometimes end up with 10 layers of different stages of it, abusing them like checkpoints. It's great to hear someone else use it in that sense too!

I did want to ask about the hard round brush. Was it the Basic-2 Opacity brush? I've switched over to Clip Studio, but I wanted to research more about how other people achieve a painterly style, so having more insight into it would be of great help. And what did you mean by a harder end on a rectangle? Is it Krita specific or is it something else entirely with the brush shape?

In the workflow as well, do you paint directly in color or do you color a grey-scale image? And if it's directly in color, do you do flat colors into the basic light and dark and then add the mid-tones, or do you start off in the mid-tones and shift into the light and darks?

Sorry again for the bombardment of questions... It's not often that I get an opportunity to ask someone I look up to directly. Thanks again for your time and for the opportunity!

Ay, no problem! I'm really happy to answer these questions!

And yes! It's the Basic-2 Opacity brush, with the only difference being that it uses Flow instead of Opacity, so it behaves a bit more naturally. Also, with one hard end and one soft end, i basically mean a brush tip that looks like [ ░░▒▒▓▓██], instead of the usual circle with either soft or hard edges and whatnot. Basically just a gradient that's squished into a rectangle, so that on the right, the opacity is at its maximum, creating a hard edge, while on the left, it begins to gradate into less opacity, making a really soft edge. It's a pretty versatile brush, that allows easily for all sorts of different stylistic choices, though it's a bit clunky to get used to.

After finishing the sketch, i paint directly in color. I start with a really low-res and rough painting of maximum 500 pixels in either width or height. This way, i can just lay in the most fundamental color and value choices in just an hour or so, without having to deal with any details. I usually do this about six times with each drawing, coming up with wildly different lighting ideas, so i can see which ones work the best for the drawing. I usually start off by just blocking in the biggest elements in the drawing, be they in the light, dark, or midtones. In this "staging process" so to speak, i try to build depth right from the start, usually by separating the background, middleground, and foreground into their own value groups; while also slapping in some initial colors (usually somewhat desaturated and close to each other in the color wheel, but that depends a lot on the mood of the scene).

I recommend taking a look at Marco Bucci's YouTube channel. His videos there helped me more than anything else when it comes to understanding color, shapes, values, etc. Slawek Fedorczuk's Artstation page is reeeeally good for clear and simple reference; plus they upload some art tips every now and then too. And then Noah Bradley's "The Fundamentals of Landscapes" video on YT is something i come back to a lot as well. It isn't just for landscapes, the fundamentals he's talking about are really useful to incorporate in any drawing, especially in regards to value grouping. In my free time, i tend to practice low-res landscape drawing from reference, which is a really useful exercise for me. Might not work for everyone, though!

Anyway, i hope this helps, and don't worry about asking lots of questions ^^ Always fun to answer them!

Thank you for your prompt responses! They have really given me some insight into the process of how to paint in the style that I adore and I now have a different framework and process to try out moving forward!

Since the brush engine and some of the tools that are in Krita are absent in Clip Studio, I gave Krita another go. Trying out the Basic-2 Opacity brush really showed me my dependence on my "painterly" brushes in Clip Studio to create the paintings I did. It also exposed my lack of understanding in the fundamentals that was being covered up with those same brushes. As frustrating as it is, I am thankful that this has showed me my core deficiencies.

Thank you as well for the video recommendations! I am currently trying to learn from Marco Bucci and I hope to be able to take away something from the videos. Here's to hoping that this year will end with a greater improvement than last year!

And thank you for the questions! Yeah, it can be quite harsh to have to change such a usual workflow, but it definitely happens a lot. Some people are able to paint with fancy brushes right from the start, make lineart with barely any sketching, and make really strong lighting decisions they don't need to change later. But i'm far as heck from being able to do that, so for now, focusing on the most basic elements of a drawing as its developing is the only way i can get through projects.

It's definitely always good to break habits and try new things to see what works. It's something i unintentionally tend to skip out on, even though it's helped me quite a lot. I myself also used to rely on fancy brushes, so when i saw that my drawings weren't quite what i wanted, i thought i was only missing a small component. But, over a couple years, i started realizing that i was really lacking on fundamentals.

But yeah, thank you! And likewise, i wish you a happy new year!