i can try!
i took screen caps of this piece throughout so lets see
proper grammar and words incoming (and low res progress pics)
Of course, you gotta start with a sketch. I usually do this in a semi transparent brush that’s a nice colour because of the Aesthetic, and it makes lining in black easier. I went with a nice hot pink.
Now you CAN go straight into painting from here, but I like to do some lineart in case I want to go down the less realistic route, and it makes specifics easier in my opinion.
I swap brushes a lot for this, but this one was done with the same marker tool as the sketch. I usually work on a 1400/1600px canvas, so this brush is about 4px wide at this point.
Then I get down to colour. Colour is one of the most important things, obviously, so I usually rough out what I want beforehand over the sketch (unfortunately I didn’t screencap that.) Then, I fill in the lineart as if it weren’t a painting. This is where my method seems to go a bit Back and Forth.
I knew I wanted a reddish tinge, so I flatted out most of the colours, and then reduced the opacity over a red background. Not the best way to go about it, but hey ho, it works.
Then I start to add in shading and vague lighting. This is vague as heck, and just done with multiple and luminosity on sai. Mostly with the airbrush and then making sharper details (Hyde’s face here) with a flat brush.
I then save and duplicate the colour layer, tuck it away somewhere safe, flatten the image, and then-
Get the heck rid of it!!! Make get rid of all the colour via saturation slider and bam, you got yourself a monochrome picture. This lets you focus on the painting aspect, with values and lighting being your main concern.
At this point I decided that the floating in the white void wasn’t doing it for me, so I just slapped on some more shapes. At this point you can also change things major, like as I started painting, I made Hyde’s collar way bigger and made it into more of a composition. From here, all you can do is rendering and adding more details.
I then took the colours that I set aside earlier, and popped them on top of the painting at about 50% opacity on overlay. I wanted to bring back that red tint a bit stronger, so I added another overlay layer of just a nice, deep red.
This desaturates the greens a bit, but that’s alright, you can bring it back later. Like I did here:
I also added a muted, green outline to Henry’s right side and a warmer, brown one to Henry’s left side to make him stand out against Hyde and the background. Hyde was always meant to be in the background in this composition, so I didn’t do the same for him. In fact, I blended him into the background:
With just a soft airbrush the same colour as the background around his edges.
I then put the picture into photoshop to colour check it. I do this to make sure it isn’t my eyes just tricking me with the colours I’ve been staring at for hours.
Sometimes I prefer the colour corrected version, but this time I was loyal to the reds. I then swapped it back, and fiddled around with filters and blurs/soft light layers (if you want to know what those are, I will gladly go over them, I use them all the time). This picture specifically didn’t need much fiddling though, so I put it back into sai for final touches.
Just adding my watermark, a particle affect, reflections on the glass, light from Hyde’s eyes (reflections on his hair and nose), stray hairs, and touching up the coloured outlines.
And that’s it! Convoluted, a bit too long, could be done better, but it’s how I do!
If you have any questions, and any all, just shoot me an ask! I hope this helped someone!
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