Gradients: Why I never thought to use such a useful tool before

Gradients have been that one thing I love to use for basic backgrounds and skies but never thought would be an acceptable thing to use in the main content of any piece. Gradients were the taboo of digital art in the places I hung around on deviantART back in high school. They were seen as 'lazy' and something that just didn't look good.


I wish I had hung around more places than just that site and the small group of people I interacted with (and still do) because my view on digital art and its creation has been so small up until recently. I was directed to a few tutorials for creating concept art that had a lot of great tips and tricks, one of which being using gradients.

I had used gradients before but I was always impatient and downright stumped on how to properly use them when trying to shade dragons and trees and what have you. I pretty much just gave up trying to figure it out and stuck to shading everything with the same 2 or 3 soft edged brushes. However, as of 2 weeks ago when I learned how important gradients are to the everyday concept artist the entire process of how I create has been flipped. I have only really tried on two occasions since then to implement gradients into my drawings (first example above) but, wow, I was missing out on some really great techniques.

Staring at some of my favorite artists' pieces and wondering how they got those smooth gradients, it never actually crossed my mind that they actually used that tool I was certain was one of the most terrible things to admit to using in the digital world. Now it makes sense that to get a perfect gradient one should use the tool made for such a task.

I've still got a ways to go before I can really properly implement this, now common in my arsenal of brushes and specialized filters, but I think I'm going to be really happy once I am able to wield the mighty gradient sword.

[image: my second attempt at using gradients, finished the past week during a livestream]