Hard edges: intentional or just where I stopped rendering?
Something I've been catching myself doing lately. I'll finish a piece, step back, and realize that my hard edges aren't really decisions. They're just the spots where I ran out of patience or forgot to come back and soften things.
The thing that finally clicked for me was doing a grayscale pass where I only thought about edges, nothing else. No rendering, no detail. Just asking myself where the viewer's eye should snap to. Turns out I was scattering hard edges everywhere like confetti, so nothing felt like it had priority. When I started being deliberate about it, even rough sketches started reading way better at thumbnail scale.
But I still catch the old habit creeping in, especially when I'm deep in a character design and zoomed in at like 300%. The silhouette reads fine but the interior is a mess of competing edges.
How do you actually think about edge control while you're working? Is it something you plan from the start or fix in a cleanup pass?
I try to use only as needed. Perhaps too few, Arty often suggests that some images seem unfinished (usually the bottom) I guess I don't spend much time looking at where my feet are.