11
I think "perfect" edges ruin digital paintings
Everyone in this community seems obsessed with getting those razor-sharp, perfectly smooth edges on everything. I've been doing digital art for about 7 years now and I keep seeing people spend hours refining a single line that honestly looked better rough. My favorite piece last month was a portrait where I left the brush strokes visible and the hair edges kinda messy. It gave it this energy that a polished version just wouldn't have. I feel like we're losing the human touch by trying to make everything look like it came out of a factory. Does anyone else feel like their looser stuff connects better with viewers?
3 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In3 Comments
west.claire18d agoMost Upvoted
Admit my "perfect" edges phase ended when I tried to clean up a sketch of my cat and it came out looking like a stock photo of a generic cat. Spent two hours adding back all the scraggly fur I'd erased. So yeah, leaving some mess in there usually keeps the soul intact.
6
That line about "lost human touch by making everything look like it came out of a factory" really hit home with me. I remember I was working on a piece a couple years ago, a landscape with some old gnarly trees. I kept smoothing out the bark texture and branches for like three hours, trying to get these perfect crisp edges. Then a friend who's a traditional painter walked by and said "why does it look so dead?" Made me stop and think. I went back and roughed up all those edges again, left some jagged strokes in the shadows. That piece ended up getting way more attention online than anything I'd polished to death. So yeah, your mileage may vary but I think that raw look connects with people on a gut level, not just a technical one.
5
mason.margaret18d ago
A friend of mine does the exact same thing and her stuff is always way more praised than mine that's all cleaned up. But I also look at stuff that's super polished, like those renders on ArtStation, and people go nuts for that too. Seems less about a rule and more about just making a piece feel alive no matter how you get there.
4