^ you can tell by just looking!?
Haha, I guess so. Like I said, smudging is one of my favorite techniques - it's just so versatile and useful, and works great in any type of blending.
In fact, my first Touhou sig was based around it (the background except for the black -> dark ultramarine gradient is all from a modified smudge brush):
My current Touhou sig actually still uses smudging, just in a different form P:
oh, mind if i ask the brush settings you're using? my smudges suck donkey balls with whatever settings i use, so i most often just opt to gaussian blur.
Yea, smudging is tricky if you don't know what settings to use.
The most important thing is to set a high smudge strength - this is usually what most people don't do when they first start smudging, they assume that ~50% is "good enough." This is not the case. Being called
smudging after all, the more you smudge, the dirtier the smudge layer gets. Thus, you
have to start out with a high smudge strength percentage to retain distinction - generally anything below 80% for smudges like my Reimu & Marisa Touhou sig would turn out bad.
Then, you want to pick a textured brush - generally one of the photoshop defaults do pretty well, when combined with the brush engine, it gives off the nice "flakes" you see in smudging techniques - ones of these ones:
Then you just set some brush engine settings and smudge away. Being the lazy me I am, I just keep them as high as possible usually:
