The Antimuddy Brush

After much deliberation and research, I've created what I hope to title the "Antimuddy Brush". Because the muddying blenders were driving me mad, I did a bit of poking around with the brush settings and found that some brushes (preferably opaque and flat brushes with no strokes)
are perfect for adjustment and use as blenders themselves... with the addition of colour and transparency. To modify them this way, enable the brush to Load multiple colours:

To paint with multiple colours

1

Choose a brush.

2

On the Stroke Designer page of the Brush Creator, click General.

3

Choose Static Bristle from the Dab Type pop-up menu.

4

Choose Multi from the Stroke Type pop-up menu.

5

On the Stroke Designer page, click Well, and enable the Brush Loading check box.

This step activates the brush’s ability to pick up underlying colors.

6

Adjust the Resaturation and Bleed sliders.

The Bleed setting determines how much underlying paint is affected by the brush stroke. A higher Bleed setting, combined with a low Resaturation setting, can enhance the Brush Loading feature. A resaturation value of 0, combined with different levels of bleed, will cause your brush to smear image colour, rather than deposit it. In this case, the lower the bleed, the longer the smear.

7

On the Stroke Designer page, click Spacing, and adjust the Spacing and Min Spacing sliders to create fewer “echo” artefacts in your smeared stroke.

8

Drag a brush stroke through existing paint to see how the paint is “picked up” from the underlying pixels and moved across the canvas.

Ok! as you can see... if you play with it you can get some good results! Lately I've been combining this with the power of the Add Water blender to get some nice, un-muddied results:

(I know the handwriting is atrocious... bear with me... )

My Gouache Anti-Muddy Brush:

Sample 1: Straight three colours, blended with Add Water in vertical strokes. Crap, right?

S. 2: same three colours, with dashes of white to space the colours slightly. Blended w/ a. w. Notice slight desaturation from white. (the reason for trying this goes back to my traditional methods of blending acrylics.

S. 3: Voila! Antimuddied results. Same three colours again, only muddled slightly by dashing the antimuddier and breaking up the two main divisions between the three. The antimuddier always was the lighter of the colours, and the brush strokes kept consistently short to allow for greater variation. Further blended with Add Water.

N. B.... Sample 3 was much easier to blend than the other two, and as you can see resulted in a more varied and realistic colour gradient. Not to mention smoother!





Also have been keeping my eye on the recent discovery that Corel softens pieces once they are saved, allowing me to worry a bit less about my smooth strokes and blending nonsense.

I realized that the Sluagh sketches look much better than the final, and took about 1/5 the amount of time-- because I was using the damn blender! So here we go, new tool for the workflow.... let's hope this one helps.