>>2303581(1/2)
Looking back there's a tonne i'd do differently, but i'll post anyway-
This has nothing to do with 'flow' settings or specific brushes, Ruanjia's a king of painting forms with careful value control. In everyone else's examples they've jumped straight into the fun detailing stage without enough consideration of the material & form they're trying to represent. No amount of texture brush highlights can save a broken image. There's plenty of pictures of his work online at their early stages and you can see he's blocking in local colours, shadow terminators & basic specular highlights with a fairly soft textureless brush before going into his rendering stage. The sharp edges & textures OP mentions are some of the last parts he adds, look around the image at the highlights and gritty textures, they're all on the top surface.
Things to note-
Don't rush into texture brushes & painting highlights, they're the cherry on the cake, make sure everything underneath is working before adding them - Learn to manage your brush strokes and not rush into making everything look 'pretty' or 'gritty' early on. If you paint everything with a hard chalk brush your final pass of textures will be lost in the mess, start soft and build up.
>>2293115 isn’t bad, but lacking in hard edges, would definitely benefit from extra thought about edge & brush hierarchies
Careful consideration of forms is key. Put a lot of effort into painting your brush strokes in 3D space, you're painting a three dimensional form so follow how it moves in space This is especially true with texture brushes, large flat textures on a curving object take away any depth,
>>2292893 is a big example of this. Break up the forms in smaller strokes if needed.
