Hi!! I have been obsessing over your art for a good while now. I LOVE your usage of colors, your compositions, and think that describing yourself as an erotic illustrator is entirely earned.
But I have been trying to figure out which setting you have turned on to have your brushes look like that, but I have not figured it out so far. It's making me go insane!! I would love to see how they feel. Would you be willing to share your brush settings?
so assuming you're referring to the last couple pieces featuring chique, what you're responding to actually isn't specific to the brush or the brush settings, but rather the gradient map and texture overlay i'm using. the effect will work differently on different types of brushes. i'll run you through what's going on.
here we have three different treatments for chique. a heavily textured rough ink brush, the csp default "real pencil", and a smooth inker from a frenden pack. the thing to take note of here is how much anti-aliasing each brush has. the rough ink brush has areas where the line is very thin, creating small pockets of gray, semi-transparent pixels. the pencil brush has a lot of these gray tones, and few areas of absolute black. and the smooth inker has very little anti-aliasing, it's clean.
now we're going to put a gradient map on them. you can access these in csp with layer>new correction layer>gradient map and it'll bring up a window with a bunch of gradient maps you can choose from. these days i mostly make my own, or i use packs i got from the clip studio asset store.
the way gradient map layers work is by looking at the values of whatever's beneath them and converting them to the colors of its gradient. if your leftmost value on a gradient map is purple and the rightmost is yellow, it will turn all your darkest values purple, and all your light values yellow, and blend whatever is in between. gradient maps typically have more than just the two values.
when used on brushes like these, the effect is very different depending on the amount of anti-aliasing--the gray values in the lineart. let's see what the gradient map i used on those previous chique drawings looks like.
what we have here is a spectrum of green to white, with highly saturated blue and red in the middle. this has turned all my areas of pure black into green, and turned the anti-aliased areas into shades of saturated purple created by the blending of the blue and red. the effect is more subtle on the rough brush, but creates a glow with the pencil. the clean brush is hardly affected at all, because it doesn't have all those little gray values.
the results here are so dramatic and eyecatching because the colors are so different. they're not quite a triad, but they're close enough that they're pleasing. let's compare the effect to a more monochromatic map.
you still get a glow, but not as much. this is perfectly fine if you want your palette to be more unified. it's the contrast that causes the glow.
anyway. to go back to the original gradient map, something to also take note of is how your color fills will affect the lineart. you will lose some of that glow when you have fills below the lineart, because you're getting rid of that spectrum of gray. it's clearest in the center example below.
look at chique's hair in the earlier lineart example vs here. the black fill no longer has that purple glow and is now just green, because all those little gray holes have been filled in with the color below, and thus darkened. you see the glow mostly at the edges, and in places where the fill is a little less cleanly done.
the last part of the process is the texture (and by last i only mean i'm explaining it last, i do all my art with the gradient map and the texture on before i start to ink). i get my paper textures from truegrit texture supply (which is having a sale for the next few days) and retrosupply. i think the one i'm using in this example is a risograph texture from retrosupply. anyway.
i apply my texture below the gradient map, because i want all those tasty gray values to be affected by the map's glow. this one is set to 50% opacity on a screen layer. other textures you may use set to overlay, or soft light, or color burn. it depends on what you're going for. the texture sources i use give them to you as clip files with the layer settings already applied, so i just use whatever they recommend. anyway, here's how these look with the texture. texture shown above at 100%.
now the big sections of black have some glow returned to them, especially the pencil brush. if i was actually using this for a finished illustration, i might actually duplicate the lineart layer for the pencil brush, lower the opacity on the copy, and merge. that would make the lines a bit more clear.
anyway, you can do this with all kind of colors and textures. the key to getting a nice glow in your big areas of black is to use a gradient map where the second darkest value is very different and slightly brighter than the darkest. that'll make your textures pop.
anyway i hope that's helpful. gradient maps are tough and require a lot of muscle memory and understanding of value. i have some other posts in my tt talks drawing tag about how best to use them.
good luck chomping my flavor!
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