Here’s another oil brush. I really must put the oils together in a collection. This one has a jagged flower petal pattern shaped brush stroke. It’s a fairly wet diluted brush that can be built up to an opaque coverage. The diluted flow makes blending the surrounding tones together really easy.
This brush is used to best effect by going over and re-working an area to diminish the appearance of the individual strokes and blend the areas together. The distinctive pattern it produces when drawn in a line can be overpowering when not blended but really works to your advantage when re-working an area over a few times as the visible brush strokes maintain a painterly appearance and reduce the likelihood of all the strokes blending together too much and becoming a mushy blur so common with overuse of blender brush tools. If used sparingly you will always be able to maintain the visible strokes that will give your painting an impressionistic and organic feel.
I hope to do a tutorial on how to best accentuate the oil painting look including adding a canvas texture but for now I’ll just say, paint on an Overlay layer and your background is important. If you watch the video at the bottom of this page, you can see that I paint most of it on an overlay layer, so that the canvas texture shows through the paint. Later, towards the end, I start painting on a normal layer, though with a light touch, to add a more opaque layer of paint in certain areas.