Discovering Hard Round Opacity

 

Hard Round Opacitive Brush. Have you seen this? Have you heard about this?

I'm lead to believe that if you're a digital artist, this is literally one of the first brushes you find out about and learn to use. I had no idea it existed until earlier this year, and it suddenly explains so much the look of digital art, painting, and coloring techniques. Even when looking up tutorials on shading, this thing never came up, instead it was always "use the air brush" or "turn down opacity on a whole layer used just for shading." Somehow, in all this time, a brush that actually alters opacity with pen pressure never tripped my radar.

This was apparently one of four main brush types utilized in Photoshop, which it seems two or three generations of digital artist cut their teeth on. By the time I actually tried getting into digital art, though, there were a ton of other alternative art programs, and as I played through the various brush types, if I ever did stumble on an opacity-pressure brush, it somehow never clicked. I was always much more concerned with finding a good basic line brush or playing with the special effects brushes. When I wanted a "paint" brush, I would try to find paint-texture brushes, most of which never really looked that much like paint to me.

It is a common wisdom in the digital art community that one should not get too hung up the types of brushes you use; there is no single magic brush that instantly levels up your own skills. However, there are certain brush functions that utilize certain mechanics that cannot be replicated with just any old brush. Soft Round (air brush) and Hard Round are two different mechanics, and if I'd just known the different options, maybe I could have had a less frustrating time with "soft" shading.

Chalk it up to my lack of actually sitting down and taking learning art more seriously. I barely think to actually look up tutorials, but when I do, I sometimes don't know what precisely I'm looking for. Just like how I should really use references a ton more than I do, its just when I start drawing, I don't even know what I'm aiming to make most of the time I'm just laying down lines, and sometimes, that flows into doing a drawing, and I'm halfway through it before it even occurs to me that "hey, maybe I should look up an image". And two-thirds of the time that happens, I don't have immediate internet access for research material, so I say screw it and keep winging it.

Sometimes, though, you just don't know what you don't know. An underconsidered obstacle to many a self-taught person is not even knowing when there are alternative possibilities to doing something, because what may seem incredibly obvious to one person just doesn't even occur to them. I'm laying it on a little thick here; I'm talking about discovering the Hard Round Opacitive as some great revelation with a little tongue-in-cheek bemusement at myself. But truly, never having encountered anyone talking about it until I stumbled into a random brush tutorial for a program I don't even use, several years after getting into digital art, is one of those perfect examples of why its important to not only have access to learning resources, but to actually know about them, and how to find alternative avenues to things you may not have considered before.

That's why you get an endless line of newbie artists who've never had an art teacher or mentor to show them incredibly basic shit, coming onto art forums and making the regulars sick and tired of that dreaded question, "What kind of brush do you use?" Sure, in most respects, the brush doesn't matter if you're learning basic level stuff. But to assume every person is looking for a "makes me look like a master artist with no effort" brush is sometimes missing what the actual question is, from someone who might literally not know the difference between an air brush and an opacity brush, or might not have any idea what a blending mode is.