WIPs for stuff (Patreon)

 Hey, so I've been posting kinda slow lately. I'm gonna try to be more active on here so you guys can see more steps of my process and keep up with my stuff more regularly. I tend to vary up my techniques, specifically in how I color things, pretty often, so I figured I'd show you guys how I'm doing my current commission and how it came together. Also lots of insane ramblings on my thought process for making an illustration.

I'm always really back-and-forth on my lineart. Sometimes I make it way more prominent and thick, sometimes I try to minimize it to the point that it's barely even there. I've always had trouble making my coloring style mesh well with more standard comic book ink drawings, but my edge control is way too poor for me to just do fully lineless paintings in anything even remotely resembling a timely fashion, so I'm constantly stuck waffling back and forth on how smooth or rough I want my painting, whether I go for more graphic shape design or more realistic light and shadow, etc. At least for this picture, I really really like how the inks turned out, but we'll have to see how long this holds up before I completely change my mind and try something radically different.

flat colors added in (details like eyes and mouth to come later). This one's... pretty self-explanatory. I put the colors in the right places and that's about it.

Okay so this is a new step that I got inspired to try by a fellow artist discussing their process. Ambient Occlusion (AO) is a thing in 3-d modelling, and I decided to adopt it for this process. AO is just the idea that when two items get really close to each other, no matter how well they're lit, they still get darker because there's just not as much room for light to bounce around. It's almost like a topographical map of the lighting; general areas of light and shadow that are going to be mostly independent of what light sources are coming from which direction. I know it doesn't look like much (and honestly it's a really really lazy and fast process) but holy shit does it help the image to look more 3-dimensional.

Light source 1. New layer set to 'Add(glow)', and a simple watercolor brush to blend together a darker, more saturated highlight tone with a much brighter specular color. I wasn't really worried too much about the full on definition of form with this one, but more on drawing focus to the figure by giving her a sharp contrast along one side that helps keep her from blending into the environment.

Light source 2, another layer on 'Add(glow)'. This is the one that was meant to help emphasize form and really give her a lot more definition. It's actually an extremely dark color I'm using here to add these highlights, but it works perfectly in the blending mode to give her depth without completely blowing your eyeballs out. Here's where you can really see the AO step from earlier coming to life and helping to really make her feel three-dimensional

Okay, that's all I got for now, but I'm gonna try to start making more things like this; give y'all some detail shots, a little more insight into my process, and earlier looks at things I haven't finished yet. Mostly I'm just super excited with how this one looks so far and wanted to share this new coloring method with you guys.