Using overlays in SAI is just as easy as using them in Photoshop. You’re all welcome to use it, no permission required! To further stave off the artificially smooth look of digital painting, I almost always overlay some sort of paper texture, and it’s almost always this one, which I scanned and edited myself.

Good for clouds and fog, as the name suggests, or just less boring gradient fills.

It’s just GREAT.īest used for smooth blending, washes, gradients, and smoky atmospheric effects.īasically a grittier version of the watercolor tool, because too much smoothness weird me out. I use it for everything from rough washes to more refined shaping and polish. I don’t use any textures with it because I think the shape of the brush provides enough of that by itself. I like to use the canvas texture on this brush to help break up the unnatural smoothness that usually accompanies digital brushes, but it works just fine without.Ī brush tool set to flat bristle ( try saving this bitmap file to your elemap folder if your version of SAI doesn’t have it) is by far my favorite to paint with. It’s heavier than my usual workhorse brush, for faster color application and rough blending, but not as heavy as the pencil tool, which has no blending at all. The plain ol’ brush tool acts as sort of an in-between for me in terms of brush flow. I find the line quality to be much more crisp than Photoshop, and you can manually adjust in-program stabilization to help smooth out hand wobbles. Mostly made this because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to have to keep turning my textures off/opacity up when I wanted to ink something (even though I don’t do it very often), or lay down flat colors. Lower opacities give it the feel of different pencil hardnesses, while full opacity makes it more like a palette knife, laying down hard-edged, heavy color for detail work or eventual blending with other brushes.

I use the pencil tool with SAI’s native paper texture both for sketching and for applying opaque color with no blending. I’ve been getting a lot of asks lately about the brushes and textures I use in my work, so here’s a BIG FAT REFERENCE POST for those of you who were curious! Bear in mind that I’m really lazy and don’t know what half the settings do, so don’t be afraid to experiment to figure out what works best for you :>

Paint tool sai skin texture brush