So here we go, a post about my drawing process, hope you can get something out of it.
I start from searching a composition/character pose by making a bunch of tiny thumbnails (pic.1). They don’t take much time and keep me from useless over-detailing.
When I found something I’m satisfied with I upscale the thumbnail to desired size. Now to get from here to lineart I can take one of three routs:
Pic.2. Proper. I don’t take it often enough.
Pic.3. I’m an expert, hold my beer.
Pic.4. Savage. Works for little drawings/doodles.
Generally, my sketches are varied from bunch of vague lines to roughly constructed objects and more or less anatomically correct “mannequins”(if it’s for a bigger picture), and stuff like clothes I often leave to figure out later in the lineart. I tried to do very elaborate sketches in the past but they would get cluttered and brought more confusion than actual help. Also inking would turn into a burden, because when every little detail has already been laid out, going over everything again felt like I was doing the same thing twice. After all, an undersketch just needs to provide some guidance so a better picture could be built on top of it, it doesn’t matter if it’s clean or looks “good”.
And you know that popular problem of hating your lineart because you think that a sketch looked much better? If your sketches never look nice in the first place then that problem is solved, ha! Okay, that may be an ill advice.
For inking part I can’t say anything substantial, I’m afraid. A demonstration of how it goes down is all I can offer, so check two videos at the end of this post.
Now, onto coloring. Going to take advantage of the moment and promote this efficient way of filling in a lineart. I keep seeing people filling in with a brush, and it hurts my non-existent soul when someone desperately tries to not go over the outer edges of the inks; oh honey, what are you doing, grab a magic wand and save yourself some time and effort.
I often keep coloring simple (either giving picture an overall tint of one color, using related colors, or two complimentary colors), because I have hard time managing lots of different colors at once. But I also don’t forget that rule of making hue of shadows opposite to hue of light. On pic.5 there are some old tests of using opposite hues for light and shadow, tad bit extreme but descriptive examples of my approach to shading.
After all of that I might through some correction layers on top of the picture. My favorite crutch is gradient map, it can add an atmosphere to dull coloring, gather a picture full of colors that don’t go together very well, or simply liven up a grayscale drawing.
I rely heavily on different layer modes and correction layers. When everything is separated like that it’s very easy to change color and lighting. There are people who seem to know exactly what result they want to achieve, so they just paint directly on flats, goddamn wizards. I’m never sure of what I’m doing so I stick to my convoluted layer juggling.
And to wrap it up here are time-lapse videos of two recent drawings.
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
izzy806
gummygunk
baratheonpilled
