>>6022772>>6022781Masks look sharp because the edges are perfectly determined by the boundaries of the selection tool or lasso. On "painterly" drawings, you'll see that the edges look softened out or blurry because the brushes used during that time were not perfect and the interpolation on the brush edge from the software will have created that gradient as the other anon said. When I painted the large sphere, i turned the mask on and never turned it off. BUT, if I were painting, I wouldn't keep the mask or selection area on, which would lead to imperfect and blurry edges like pic rel. The decision to make edges blurry or hard is completely dependent on where I want the viewer to focus. IF it's blurry, then the viewer will most likely glance over it and pay attention to the sharp edges which becomes a high point of interest, kind of like what RJ does. He puts so much emphasis on the hands because he probably zoomed in real close to make sure he got it perfect, but on the things like the legs and backgrounds, he most likely zoomed out and let his brush (any low res brush will do this) naturally blur things which makes it look painterly.
TLDR: if you don't want it to look like a mask, turn the mask on for the initial set up, and then immediately turn it off once you have your values set up so you can get the painterly approach. Make sure to read up on "hard/lost edges/edge control" in painting.
