Welcome to the Fix List, a guide to improving your paintings by looking at other work in search of common visual problems. In today's problem is Craftsmanship, and while this is a pretty broad idea, what I want to focus on is brush control, because whether it's a messy edge or choppy rendering, beginners really have trouble with good craftsmanship. So let's take a look at some examples from the control paint community. This one here suffers from a classic problem. It still has lines. And it has lines in a style that to me doesn't look like it's really supposed to have lines, they're just still here. Well, here's the secret. Lines do not exist. Line is an artist's shorthand, but if what you're doing is rendering with light and color, all lines do is really kind of destroy the illusion. So in my paint over, all I've done is remove the lines. What we're left with is not a finished painting by any means, but you can see these areas here look so much more like believable forms. One more time here is before we can see we have sort of a muddy edge with a line and then another area of color. I've sharpened up that edge, and I've made sure we're just working with areas of tone meeting up next to each other. So an edge is just one area of color bumping into another area of color. There's no black line separating the two. It's a pretty simple idea, but it takes some practice to get here. But one more time, here's the original, and here's my paint over. Getting rid of those lines really helps it move from drawing to painting. This right here is another common problem, and what we see here is texture, overwhelming form, as in the image feels sort of weirdly flat, even though there's all this nice rich texture. Well, the way I see it, texture is something you add on top of a solid painting. So for my paint over, what I decided to do was first to establish the big shapes with more definition. And this comes back to sort of strong light direction and clear edges, so we can understand where one form ends and the next one begins. But there's still really not a lot of details. After that then, I'm able to go ahead and add details on top. And I really only got started here if this were my painting I would go much further. For the details and the texture overlays, only work on top of a solid base that has a clear sense of form, light, and shadow. In the original, it didn't have a sense of three dimensionality. It was pretty flat to begin with, and then the texture on top doesn't really add much. So one more time, here's before, and here's after. This image is more complex, but I think it suffers from the same exact problem. Here we have overlapping strokes that I think are supposed to indicate texture, but what they really indicate is just a bit of sloppiness. So once again, I'd advocate starting with a strong foundation and then adding details on top. So let's take a look at my paint over. And I'm actually just going to do this one little square here. So we'll zoom into the square that I worked on. So you can see I first rendered it as if there was no surface texture. You can see here's before the edges were a bit messy, and you can see all these visible brush strokes. So I cleaned up the edges, and I smoothed out the form rendering, paying attention to make sure my material's red is different from one another. And after I was satisfied with what I'll call the foundation, then I was able to add texture on top. So we can zoom out and see here's the before and here's the after. Yes, it does still have lots of little textural strokes and lots of kind of detailed elements on top. But in my opinion, that only works because it began with a solid form rendering and only then were texture strokes added on top. I think if you start to go right for that texture right away, the image risks losing its three-dimensional quality and ends up getting a little bit messy. And even an excellent painting like this actually suffers from some of the same issues. If we just look at the main wrestler here, it looks great. But I think consistency is a really important aspect of craftsmanship. And if we scroll down here, we can see that there are kind of messy brush strokes visible on this foreground character. Now you could say, well, we're supposed to be looking at the focal point. And so the rest is sort of intentionally loose. And I'm not sure I buy that. When I look at the bottom here, I think it's actually just a little bit sloppy. So what I've done is I've begun by cleaning up the brush marks sort of smoothing out the rendering. Now it got a little bit blurry here, but I'll fix that with the relighting. So that was two steps. We'll do that from the zoomed out view here we had. Bring up the messy brush strokes. And then the light here doesn't quite match the light in the rest of the scene. We can see that he has a rim light in his bodies and shadow because the lights are on the ceiling. While the same should be true for this character here, but he's much brighter as if there was a light behind him. I'm going to have to assume that the lights are really only these ones on the ceiling. So my relighting puts him largely in shadow with a bit of that rim light. So here's the before and here's the after. And in my opinion, the high quality of this character here should have extended to the entire composition because once we see a mistake, it can be hard to look at the good stuff because we're a bit distracted by it before, after. All right, and let's finish off with one of my paintings. When I look back at this older one, and I like looking at it, it's hard to look at your old work sometimes, and this one's a doozy. And the thing is, I like the background. The problem is all this stuff in the foreground. It's kind of sloppy. There's really no structure. The sense of light is a bit ambiguous. So in my paintover, I began by just blocking in solid shapes in the foreground. Sometimes in order to fix a painting, you have to remove detail and really solidify the big elements, sort of the initial read, and then add details on top. So my details did bring much more, sort of a photorealism back into it. But you can see here now, I have very clear road bushes and then these metal structures. So we'll go to the before, which is this kind of vague and sketchy and really maybe gives an impression of a space, but it kind of falls apart when you start looking close. And then here's the after, which in my opinion has a much more consistent level of polish across the entire image. The great thing about Craftsmanship is that you can always improve it. If you have time to work on a piece, you can make it better. And you'll know this is true just by pulling out something you made one or two years ago, it is amazing how much you can improve it. So give it a try. And I want to thank the Brave audience members that sent in their art to help with this project. It's not easy to get your work critiqued, so thanks for the help. See you in the next video.