/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>Be me, always drew with pen/ink
>Better than most at sketching and linework, I think, at least when compared to amateurs
>Go digital in like 2012, try to learn to work with color and paint without relying on flat linework
>Make some progress, but only in sai
>Sai feels limiting because I can't get custom brushes for landscape painting to work in any sort of practical way
>Try to move into photoshop
>photoshop is far more capable but has some issues I can't get around, and I can't tell if it's my settings or my crappy pirated copy perhaps, or just something I need to learn to deal with.
>In sai, opacity being on doesn't make colors overlap
>in photoshop, it makes the colors overlap if you lift the pen, and makes blending difficult
>Hard round in sai has settings to make it slightly blend with the other colors you're painting over
>photoshop doesn't as far as I can tell, besides the horrendous mixer brush which for me, shows tons of little circles as if flow was really low, but it's not
>No stabilizer to help with edges (i can work around this one, just mildly annoying).
>Now, i have my fundies down well, but because of these issues I get so frustrated that I can't paint literally anything in P.S.
>I literally have not improved at painting since 2013, despite doing it daily, because I get frustrated every fucking time.

God damnit, I just want to learn to paint landscapes so I can get my ideas out. I feel like just sketching/drawing isn't enough to properly depict the scenes I want to create, but despite having had drawing in general come naturally to me, with no actual studying required on my part beyond doing it daily, painting is impossible. I just can't make things look good and I have no idea why. I understand anatomy, I understand values, I'm good with foreshortening and never needed to grind boxes because depicting shapes was always just a natural thing for me. So why have I made no fucking progress?

Your goal is to lay down the general shapes in the sketching stage, and then trace over those shapes to give them more form. When you're laying it down, chicken-scratch is fine. Your goal is to just figure out the shape/locations of things. Then, on the refinement stage, your goal becomes to make that line in a single stroke. You can also develop the hand/wrist/shoulder control to do multiple lines, but all leading into each other to create one smooth line. 2nd method is easier to get good at, but probably wont look as clean.

Always follow the curviture of your wrist/elbow/shoulder if you need smoothly curved lines. Basically your hand should be stationary and you move your entire arm to have a consistent line. Constantly rotate the canvas to make it so that every line is made in a direction that is natural for your wrist. After figuring this out, you're going to want to practice lineweight.

Also, just so you don't do what I did. Don't focus only on linework. It's a good skill to have but depicting form with values will always be more important. I spent 15 years drawing weeb shit and now I can throw down linework that has impressed professionals a few times, but I can't get a fucking job because everyone wants fully rendered illustrations and not clip art looking shit, no matter how good it is.

I'd recommend learning just the basics of linework and then immediately moving onto study of anatomy, values, colors, etc.