hello guys im so excited to present nuniqs new headshot :33333 i feel like i nailed the val art style a lot better this time around and it shows how i envision her much better . im so happy i love making progress as an artist YAYYYYYY
uncropped + wip shots under readmore:
hallo welcome to floof wips. im gonna roughly explain my process here HEHE
so start with a grayscale base . i kinda cheated here because i used her 3d model but usually ur gonna want to just block out the basic values and make sure everything is distinct and contrasts well or else it gets all muddy and blends into eachother.
after that i drop the skin color over it since thats the most important thing to be rendered rn. dont worry about the other details since we'll get to them later .
at this stage i would paint over everything on another layer to fix the hues since the color layer doesnt get everything correctly . from here i referenced the other val portraits to get the right shade of lineart etc
in this shot you can see i painted over the hair because i didnt like how it was looking :33 thats fine, its an okay thing to do, sometimes u have to kill the "already good" parts of your painting to fix some underlying issues . for example i wanted there to be more gaps in her bangs so i scrapped the hair and painted her forehead in
something i realized with the valorant art style is that, the less you blend the better actually . the icon started looking more "valorant" the second i ditched the blending tool and just started picking local colors and blocking them in. it took a way a lot of the muddiness and moved it towards the more graphic art style val has. youll noticed i also shifted the hair towards a more purple hue instead of a brown one :33 i didnt use adjustment layers or blending modes, i just used my glaze brush with a bluish color until it looked right-- then i painted over it Again to fix the values while staying in that hue
anyway i hope this helps somehow !!!! always reference and think of things in 3d . something something closing statement . YAY
