/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

I would like to get critiques, specifically about the way I (digitally) painted; my brush strokes, basically.

I know there are anatomy mistakes, composition is probably horrible (made it up on the spot and added things around the biggest subject, then a background at the end), and the shading on the middle beast went to the shitter. Lighting probably doesn't make sense either, that's fine, I'll study room lighting down the line.

I did one finished turd for the sake of finishing something at all, I know you guys have a hard-on for doing studies for 15 years before coloring a gift card. Yeah I am back to studying the basics already, no worries here.

I am just worried that I may pick up bad habits when rendering, because I am unable to judge the rendering/program-related problems.

For this, I used circle brush, 90-100 density, 0 persistence; I'd say 80%ish edge hardiness. I start with putting down base colors as 2-3 tones depending on the distance/size, and then I smoothed it out with the above brush.

I noticed that I could either go high persistence, with 50% blending, or 0 persistence and 0% blending, using varying pen pressure to smooth the colors. This feels sort of like using a pencil to shade.

Whereas using 50% blending feels like mixing fresh paint. Though I never painted traditionally so it may be an uneducated guess.

Anyway, is there anything wrong with this method inherently? Are strokes smoothing out too much? Is there an advantage to using different kind of brushes and other settings?

Playing around with a drawing program's settings is counter-intuitive, not sure what corrections to make.

I'm also highly inconsistent between the objects, yet I have used the same exact brush settings; hopefully that one comes down to practice and familiarity with the program.

If you need the original size to judge strokes better, I'll post it. This one is roughly 1/3rd.