Spent a full day trying to get a simple color blend right in Procreate

I was trying to make a smooth sunset sky for a piece, and the gradient kept looking muddy and wrong. After about 8 hours of messing with layer modes and brushes, I realized I had the wrong brush texture selected the whole time. Anyone have a good brush set for smooth skies?

3 comments

3 Comments

riley_west9d ago

Ugh don't you just want to scream when that happens? I did the EXACT same thing last week, trying to blend some pinks and oranges. I was using the watercolor brush and it left these weird streaks, looked like a bad tie-dye. Switched to the flat brush with the opacity turned way down and just did tiny circles where the colors met. Total game changer, it went from a mess to smooth in like two minutes.

the_james10d ago

Yeah the "muddy and wrong" gradient thing is so real. I read a tutorial once that said to avoid the soft airbrush for skies because it can look flat. They recommended using a hard round brush at low opacity and just building up the color slowly. Sometimes I'll use the gouache brush with the blend mode set to normal, just tapping lightly where the colors meet.

richard_dixon1d ago

Man, that hard round brush trick is a lifesaver. I was doing a sunset last month and the soft airbrush just killed all the depth, made it look like a solid wall of color. Felt exactly like what riley_west was saying about the tie-dye streaks, just a different kind of bad. Switched to a basic round brush, like 20% opacity, and just kept layering light orange over dark red. Took a minute but it finally looked like real light in the sky, not a flat fill.