03-22-2016, 05:11 PM
Love your drawings! You've got a good sense of form and shape going on.
As for your question about edges in between forms, take a look at this painting by Harold Speed.
Try to overlap your brush strokes rather than painting them side by side until they meet. He gets hard edges by painting a loaded brush over the bottom layer(for example, the hard edge in the middle of the nose). In digital you can get a hard edge like this a number of ways. Hard edged brush stroke (explained above), selection/lasso tools , smudge, mixer brush, sharpen, etc. So try all those things and also try to lower the spacing on your brush settings under the "brush tip shape" tab.
When it comes to where to decide where to put hard and soft edges, follow the contours of the Harold speed painting or Sargent's portrait painting.Basically when you get an intersection of lines you want to keep the most important edge (in your opinion) hard and the one next to it soft. For example look at the middle of the neck of this girl in that painting. The edge is hard along the shadow casted from the chin and then soft to show the rounded form of the neck; then back to a hard edge at the sternocleidomastoid muscle. Also notice how the left muscle is a harder edge than the right one. The theory is that you do not want 2 hard edges competing for attention.
One more thing that I'm not really sure about but noticed in one of Sargent's paintings. If you alternate soft and hard edges in bigger gaps, the eye will move faster. So in your focal points, you want to vary your edges a lot to keep the eye in place. The eye is attracted to those hard edges and if you can lead the eye around by playing with lost and found edges, you can improve your compositions as well. These aren't rules or anything but it may help you out.
Hopefully that made sense :D Looking forward to more updates from you.
As for your question about edges in between forms, take a look at this painting by Harold Speed.
Try to overlap your brush strokes rather than painting them side by side until they meet. He gets hard edges by painting a loaded brush over the bottom layer(for example, the hard edge in the middle of the nose). In digital you can get a hard edge like this a number of ways. Hard edged brush stroke (explained above), selection/lasso tools , smudge, mixer brush, sharpen, etc. So try all those things and also try to lower the spacing on your brush settings under the "brush tip shape" tab.
![[+]](images/collapse_collapsed.png "[+]")
Spoiler![[Image: tumblr_mdlyl3LmlN1rrnekqo1_1280.jpg]](https://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdlyl3LmlN1rrnekqo1_1280.jpg)
When it comes to where to decide where to put hard and soft edges, follow the contours of the Harold speed painting or Sargent's portrait painting.Basically when you get an intersection of lines you want to keep the most important edge (in your opinion) hard and the one next to it soft. For example look at the middle of the neck of this girl in that painting. The edge is hard along the shadow casted from the chin and then soft to show the rounded form of the neck; then back to a hard edge at the sternocleidomastoid muscle. Also notice how the left muscle is a harder edge than the right one. The theory is that you do not want 2 hard edges competing for attention.
One more thing that I'm not really sure about but noticed in one of Sargent's paintings. If you alternate soft and hard edges in bigger gaps, the eye will move faster. So in your focal points, you want to vary your edges a lot to keep the eye in place. The eye is attracted to those hard edges and if you can lead the eye around by playing with lost and found edges, you can improve your compositions as well. These aren't rules or anything but it may help you out.
Hopefully that made sense :D Looking forward to more updates from you.