Hello hello!! I just wanna start off by saying how GORGEOUS your art is! Truly inspiring. I was wondering what your process was? Again, your art is truly impressive
Thank you!!
Oh man, it was a saga and you've opened a can of worms because my favorite thing to ramble about outside of sad gay space robots is our unholy overlord Photoshop
(warning for length)
Hatching workflow:
step 1: have too many Doré artbooks
The refined process is thumbnail > cleaner sketch > black-and-white base OR 3D render > cut out whites > clean up edges > mask out each building/section > hatching lines with the upcoming layer setup
Below is the layer setup I use for hatching!
First I separated each element into its own folder, with its own mask—
Then used this structure in each folder—
I just want the hatching lines to appear black when on lit areas, and white on shadowed areas (as opposed to having to draw part of a line in white and another part in black). So, after separating the lit and shadowed sides, I copied the "Light" layer, clipped it on top of a folder of hatching lines, and inverted its layer mask.
(*I draw on layer masks because it's easier to recolor lines + toggle between drawing and erasing with the "X" shortcut (I have fore- and background colors set to black and white for layer masks))
Sometimes I do a pass of grayscale values and overlay that layer on top as a reference while hatching.
I've two main brushes: one choppier and one smoother and tapered at the ends (for thin lines, 2px-3px). Really thin horiz/vert lines are just the Pencil at 1px.
Black-and-white workflow with 3D:
Tbh at first I only intended to make that one lurking Drift illustration. But I cower from 3D like it’ll kill me, so I turned it into a 3D assignment. First I used that "separate ways" piece to make myself model at low stakes (I just made items from the comic backgrounds and jammed them together), then I modeled the Dead End wide shot and got the final lurking Drift comp from that.
1. Drew enough detail to model (>see the 5th image in this post)
2. Used fSpy to generate a Blender camera that matched my perspective
3. Shoved together the barest essentials of the clinic set in Blender (setting the 5th image in this post as a background image in Viewport)
4. Rendered at hi-res twice: once with lighting, once with Freestyle outlines.
5. Changed clinic design in the close-up, so I went back to revise the wide shot.
In conclusion, my hobby is wrangling Photoshop to minutely speed up the extremely tedious and niche thing I can't stop myself from doing
If anyone's got a faster way to do any of this, tell me!!
here's a gif for funsies because I get 1 more image on this post
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