Digital painting techniques - Which one to use??

Well I am just learning some digital painting in Photoshop... and I found several digital painting styles, most popular being smudge style where you use smudge tool in Photoshop to create smooth transitions between color, and other style where you don't use smudge tool but making those transitions only with brush tool with different variations on brush color and opacity...





So which of those two styles can you reccomend me as a better one and why? Which one do you use? I tried both but still not sure which one should I stick to, and what is the difference in results...





So I just need some tips on coloring those transitions after putting some rough colors... Any tips much appreaceated...





Thanks :))


Digital painting techniques - Which one to use??
There IS no one, better way. The reason applications like Photoshop have so many different ways to do things is so that the user can pick the method that works in that particular situation.





There is NO advantage for you to pick only one to stick to. In fact, it would be a much better idea for you to experiment and practice MANY different styles. What works in one image, may not work as well in another. You can make color transitions with the blur took and the airbrush, and with the gradient. You can go to the individual color chanels and make the blends that way, for completely different results. You can mask, and feather a selection. You can adjust the transparency of certain parts of a layer. And there are several more methods.





The point is that each one produces different results, so that the artist is free to choose which works best. Spending hundreds of dollars on Photoshop, only to limit oneself to a few, ';favorite'; methods, is like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a fast road car, only to make endless left turns on an oval. A waste of a LOT of performance.Digital painting techniques - Which one to use??
Good question. It really depends on what your doing at that moment. Some art styles, like lineart coloring, use both styles. Besides, there are many styles, these are just 2.





Each situation requires different styles.
The only ';best'; way of colouring is the one that you're best at and is most comfortable for you, so it's really something you have to work out for yourself by practicing different techniques. There are many ways of doing it, so if the ones you tried so far aren't hitting the spot, keep looking!





Certain techniques do work better with certain art styles, so if you posted some examples of your work I may be able to make some suggestions.





If you can afford to buy some learning materials, the video tutorials here are fantastic: http://www.digitalarttutorials.com/ A couple of them are free to download, so definitely get those, but look through the others too - the artist tackles a different colouring style in each volume (comics, anime, photorealism etc) and they're really worth getting if you find one that looks interesting to you.