Do Your Digital Paintings Look Flat? Need something more "real" looking?

After being a traditional painter for years, and having the natural texture of paint on my paintings, I have to say, one of my main issues with digital paintings, especially in Corel Painter, is that the finished painting looks flat, or smeary, and certainly not real. No ridges or depth, nope, nada. There are a few ways to circumvent that in Painter, but not always what I am looking for. Note: Painter's Thick Paint brushes are not what I'm looking for, personally.

And, to be fair, that "flat" look can happen in any painting software.

You could add paint stroke texture overlays in Photoshop, but you can't match the texture strokes to your painting. It often doesn't look real.

There is one easy way to add some impasto to your finished painting and it will match your paint strokes in your finished painting. I use Artrage 5, but this most likely works in any version of Artrage.

Above is a finished painting I did in Painter and it's ok, but it doesn't look like a "real" painting to me.
So I brought the finished image into Artrage via File>Import Image File.
Add a new layer above the file you just imported.
Set the blend mode of the new layer to Multiply.
Choose the Oil>Thick Gloss brush
Choose White as your paint color.
On the new blank layer, brush your strokes to match the direction and size of the strokes in your original painting.

Here you can see that I was able to brush strokes in the direction the hair flows and brush all my other strokes in the direction and location that I chose. The default brush settings for the load of the Thick Gloss brush are 60%. That was a bit much for me, so I lowered the load to 47%. 

By setting the new layer to Multiply and painting with white, only the grey shadows of the stroke can be seen. 

This is a landscape painting using this technique and I think it gives, especially the sky, some nice texture. You will notice the very top part of the sky and the far lower right has not been brushed yet.

I like this easy technique and hope you find a use for it in your art journey.


Thanks for looking! xxx