This exercise is honestly a bit of a nightmare, but that’s exactly why you should do it. I’m painting a study from The Last Emperor using only one hard, opaque brush. No soft brushes, no layer modes, and no curves adjustments to save me. It feels completely unnatural, but stripping away those tools forces you to manually pick every single color shift and value change.

It stops you from relying on digital tricks and makes you focus entirely on the fundamentals of edges and temperature. If you usually rely on gradients to make things look smooth, this will expose that habit immediately. It’s frustrating, but it’s the fastest way to find out where your weak points are and fix them.