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Rant: stopped using the smudge tool for blending, switched to a hard brush at 30% opacity and my shading finally stopped looking like mud
Seriously, 2 years of smudging every gradient and it always went gray and blurry. Tried the brush thing after a Twitch artist mentioned it in a stream and the difference on skin tones alone was night and day. Anyone else get mad they wasted so long on the wrong tool?
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ross.angela17d ago
The smudge tool isn't actually the problem though, it's how you use it. A lot of pro artists still smudge, they just do it on a separate layer with low opacity and barely touch the canvas. The gray and muddy look comes from overworking the same spot until the colors mix into each other too much, not from the tool itself. So you didn't waste two years exactly, you just learned the hard way that smudging needs a light hand. The hard brush trick is great for blocking in shapes and building up color, but for soft skin blends a tiny bit of smudge at the end still helps a ton.
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noah91717d ago
Learned this the hard way after fighting muddy faces for months, and what finally helped was lowering the smudge strength to like 20 percent and using a textured brush instead of the default round one. Turns out the tool was fine, I was just dragging it across the same cheek fifty times like an idiot. Now I block everything in with hard edges first, then do one quick pass of light smudge at the very end just to knock down the harsh lines.
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