Blending In Photoshop

Heyo fine folk of the interwebs! It's been rather a long time... I am working in Dallas Texas as a concept artist for Green Grass Studios. It has been delightful and challenging and has taken up much of my time. I have, however, promised a demo for making blending brushes in Photoshop. So here it is. I hope this helps.

For quite awhile I have seen people blending using opacity. The technique involves setting a brush to fifty percent opacity and painting over the other color, selecting the new color, and repeating until there is a clean blend.

This process takes awhile and ultimately can still leave the painting with bands in it. A few years back, I learned that blending could also be done with the smudge tool. Again, by lowering the opacity on a soft brush, a blend could be achieved.

To make this work without a ragged edge takes time and patience. When I'm under a deadline I find I don't have either to spare. So I've been working on a brush that could expedite the process. As it turns out, the smuge tool works very well with the correct brush settings. I have gone over making brushes in a different post (here), so I will show you just the setting you need for a blending brush. You really can use any brush you want. For this I used the standard soft brush that comes with photoshop. You will want to modify the scattering settings. Scattering makes the brush do the work for you. 

 

One stroke with this brush had the following effect.

 

Using different brushes will allow for different blending effects.

 I hope this helps, and makes the process of finding the correct edge quality easier.

The following is a gif of my process with most paintings. In it you can see that I use blending a lot.

I hope you all have a wonderful evening, Fine Folk!