The #1 best "Blender tip" (that also applies to computer graphics in general), is that by default it is
horribly incorrect with its treatment of colour spaces and especially gamma/tonemapping.
Rather than me clumsily explaining with text how to get this right and have your artwork "pop" with very little effort, watch this video titled "The Secret Ingredient to Photorealism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA
Combine that with physically correct materials and rendering, and you could literally "sketch" a handful of grey boxes with a single area light and have it nearly pop out of the screen with uncanny realism!
The #2 tip is that chances are that you're probably working with a cheap LCD monitor. Even for $600-$1000 you can get a very decent monitor with DCI-P3 or AdodeRGB wide gamut support and more accurate colour. That helps to produce content that is consistent and correct. That, or invest in a calibrator and set up your operating system colour management with the ICC profile of your panel. Without this, images you grab from Chrome or Firefox will shift in hue and/or brightness when you import them into image editing software. Test your browser with this site: https://cameratico.com/tools/web-browser-color-management-te...
The #3 tip is that you can make much better colour choices working in a perceptual space. The colour pickers in most software use trivial RGB 0..255 ranges mapped to a rectangle. This is garbage, criminally lazy, clownshoes programming. Yet, everybody does it, resulting in these "curtains of colour" controls: https://www.google.com/search?q=colors+picker+control&tbm=is...
You shouldn't be seeing those vertical streaks! The transitions should be smooth and even. An excellent space to use for picking colours or creating gradients is Oklab: https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/
Notice how beautiful it looks compared to the other spaces, which are horribly uneven looking?
Even just these tips can make someone like me, a non-artist, produce beautiful images, web pages, or 3D models.
Art isn't magic, it's a technical skill and you can learn it!
Rather than me clumsily explaining with text how to get this right and have your artwork "pop" with very little effort, watch this video titled "The Secret Ingredient to Photorealism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA
Combine that with physically correct materials and rendering, and you could literally "sketch" a handful of grey boxes with a single area light and have it nearly pop out of the screen with uncanny realism!
The #2 tip is that chances are that you're probably working with a cheap LCD monitor. Even for $600-$1000 you can get a very decent monitor with DCI-P3 or AdodeRGB wide gamut support and more accurate colour. That helps to produce content that is consistent and correct. That, or invest in a calibrator and set up your operating system colour management with the ICC profile of your panel. Without this, images you grab from Chrome or Firefox will shift in hue and/or brightness when you import them into image editing software. Test your browser with this site: https://cameratico.com/tools/web-browser-color-management-te...
The #3 tip is that you can make much better colour choices working in a perceptual space. The colour pickers in most software use trivial RGB 0..255 ranges mapped to a rectangle. This is garbage, criminally lazy, clownshoes programming. Yet, everybody does it, resulting in these "curtains of colour" controls: https://www.google.com/search?q=colors+picker+control&tbm=is...
You shouldn't be seeing those vertical streaks! The transitions should be smooth and even. An excellent space to use for picking colours or creating gradients is Oklab: https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/
Notice how beautiful it looks compared to the other spaces, which are horribly uneven looking?
Even just these tips can make someone like me, a non-artist, produce beautiful images, web pages, or 3D models.
Art isn't magic, it's a technical skill and you can learn it!