- I would now like to talk about tools that are not used to apply paint to the canvas, but that are used to manipulate the paint that already is on the canvas. And in the Tool palette, we find this little selection of these tools, the Blur Tool, the Sharpen Tool, and the Smudge Tool. And the most useful of these three tools is the Smudge Tool, and we'll first have a look at this one.
So what the Smudge Tool does is it smudges the paint that is already on the canvas. And you can immediately see that this is a very useful tool to create painterly effects. It breaks up the edgy contours of the digital brushes, and makes them more organic.
And, if we even use a more structured brush tip, this effect is even much more apparent. So the Smudge Tool is a nice way even to blend colors, and you should experiment with different Strength settings can make it very strong, and that way you will pull the color over the whole canvas.
You can have very painterly effects that way. So what about the other two tools? The Blur Tool is much more supple. With the Blur Tool you can apply a blur to the color that is on the canvas, and I will just zoom in a little bit so you can see it better. So, look at these sharp edges here. When I'm using the Blur Tool, they get softened. And in some cases, this might be useful.
The counterpart of the Blur Tool is the Sharpen Tool. Well it does the exact opposite of the Blur Tool, it sharpens edges, and it always comes with these color distortions in the sharpened areas, and generally, it's not a tool often used by digital painters. There might be some applications in photo retouching, but for painting, the Sharpen Tool is not really often used.
Much more often, a digital painter will use the Smudge Tool. And there's actually an interesting detail about the Smudge Tool. You can see here in the Brush window, that we have Spacing activated for the Smudge Tool, and we can play around with it a little bit, but no matter what spacing we activate here in the Brush window, the result always looks kind of same, but if we turn off Spacing, something interesting happens.
The Smudge Tool now behaves quite differently from it's earlier behavior, and it becomes a sort of dry brush tool that we can use to smudge our color on the canvas in a very painterly, pastel-like manner. And this is an interesting behavior of the Smudge Tool if you turn off Spacing.
If you turn Spacing on again, the Smudge Tool behaves normally again, and these two variations of the Smudge Tool are very helpful for digital painting and illustration.
Author
Released
7/2/2015- Setting up your digital canvas
- Controlling the screen
- Choosing color
- Working with brushes, textures, and the Paint Bucket and Gradient tools
- Making selections
- Working in Quick Mask mode
- Stroking and filling paths
- Manipulating color
- Organizing the canvas with layers
- Digital drawing and painting projects
Skill Level Beginner
Duration
Views
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Introduction
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Welcome58s
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1. Setting the Digital Canvas
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Size in centimeter or inches2m 42s
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Size in pixels2m 32s
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More settings2m 18s
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2. Control of the Digital Screen
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Zoom and Hand tools5m 50s
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Rotate View tool1m 6s
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A second view2m 38s
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Summary1m 7s
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3. Tools for Choosing Color
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Color picker8m 42s
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Color palette1m 23s
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Swatches palette1m 5s
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4. Tools for the Application of Color
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Brush Tip Shape5m 36s
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Shape Dynamics5m 18s
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Scattering1m 37s
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Texture2m 10s
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Dual Brush1m 54s
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Color Dynamics5m 31s
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Transfer3m 15s
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Fade2m 21s
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Custom brush tips4m 55s
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Paint Bucket2m 4s
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Gradient4m 9s
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Blend modes5m 53s
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5. Supporting Tools
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Marquee tool4m 19s
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Lasso tool2m 47s
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Quick Mask mode4m 41s
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Adding a stroke to paths2m 24s
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Filling a path2m 57s
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6. Manipulating Color
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Hue/Saturation2m 18s
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Curves4m 1s
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Color Balance3m 14s
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7. Organizing the Digital Canvas
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Painting on separate layers2m 36s
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Locking transparent pixels2m 53s
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Group layers2m 27s
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Eraser tool1m 16s
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Layer masks3m 38s
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8. Digital Drawing
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Perspective Grid7m 23s
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Rough sketch4m 27s
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Final Drawing: Part 13m 3s
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Final Drawing: Part 24m 33s
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Final Drawing: Part 34m 55s
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9. Colored, Digital Drawing
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Rough sketch5m 15s
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Final Drawing: Part 13m 25s
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Final Drawing: Part 22m 32s
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Shading in grayscales3m 47s
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Using coloring layers4m 33s
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Finishing touches8m 48s
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10. Digital Painting
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Color composition7m 5s
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Rough sketch6m 2s
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Painting the midground5m 33s
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Painting the palace6m 30s
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Painting the far background5m 54s
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Conclusion
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Video: Smudge, Blur, and Sharpen tools