/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>3613306
Treat what you have now as more of a guide, then start thinking like a painter going forward. Get rid of most of your linework by painting over it, and use brushes with pressure set to opacity. Think about edge control with your marks instead of the binary this is the flat light shape, this is the flat shadow, etc.

Texture brushes are a must. Play around with them to find ones you like. You can get away with 90% or more of your painting using a chalky texture brush that has good coverage. At a normal painting size its texture do its thing. You can shrink it way down and use it for fine lines and details. You can enlarge it to the point it seems unreasonable, and paint lightly on a separate layer to incorporate some macro textures. You can adjust the opacity of this layer, or the blending mode, and then on another opaque layer on top do some more painting.

A lot of it is playing around and experimenting, seeing what happy accidents occur, then reinforcing them. You'll need to spend time zoomed in defining your tiny forms, thinking about convex and concave surfaces, the direction of your light sources, etc.

Try not to go overboard too. Push the textures in the focal points and along the terminator. It's good to even paint over and remove some texture in areas that don't need it. Zoom out often and make sure you're improving the piece and not destroying the read of the big value shapes.

Do studies of alligators, rocks, etc and apply what you learn. Find artists on artstation doing paintings similar to what you want and so small focused studies of portions of their work.

Pic related is a 10min proof of concept. You'd obviously want to spend more time than that building the right texture you want and cleaning it up. Save texture for after everything is laid down.

When you post the final, shrinking the image then applying a sharpen filter to the focal points will make the textures look better.