For the past 10 years, I have tried replicating traditional brushwork in the digital medium. For me, all painting, but particularly realistic, is about beautiful mark-making, interesting brushwork, and lost edges. As David Leffel puts it, "The edges are the soul of a painting", they simply sing to me in ways no hyper-realistic render ever could. After all, it's the abstraction that makes painting beautiful, not the 1:1 copying of what already is. Art is not there to document what is. People enjoy art because art shows what could be, that's where the magic lies, in my opinion. Things that are familiar, but also different, the simplification, the abstraction, the essence.
Unfortunately, since in digital we are painting with stamps that look the same, with no inherent variation or beauty, these things that make a painting sing to me are very, very hard to obtain naturally. Sure, the world is filled with "digital oil paintings" that use a texture brush to smudge, but most of those look fake because obtaining strokes and edges that look natural takes a lot of work and knowledge about what you need to obtain. You really have to love these things to put in all that effort.
Here are two versions of a rough sketch, exemplifying what I believe to be beautiful and natural-looking brushwork. The sketch is done after a Jeremy Lipking painting (all credit goes to him), but it could've been anyone else that holds the same high regard for the qualities mentioned above.
Some other examples: https://brushesandlife.blogspot.com/2023/02/process-sargent-study-and-applying.html
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