#I draw the sketch/lineart basically->colors underneath->render over the sketch layer using the same brush of the lineart/sketch

[soapyakships]

Could we have a time-lapse of any of your works? I've always wondered what your drawing process is

i dont have any that are SUPER recent but the latest one i can find is this one for 3rd anniversary but my process is still the same

[ssalballoon]

Whats your art process and what would you reccomend for someone who would like to achieve a style similar to yours? i love this mix of cartoonism and realism. your work is such an inspiration >.<

oh gosh! thank you?! 💞 i'll do my best to explain it, but even I have a difficult time trying to understand my own art process/style because of how inconsistent it is;; (i still have a lot to learn!) this is gonna be a long reply so i'll place it under the cut

process:

I start loose with a more gesture type rough sketch. I mainly just do lineart in the same layer as my sketch and erase away parts I don't like. Sometimes I'll lower the sketch's opacity and on a new layer do my lineart (which is what i did for the drawing above). But regardless doing that loose gesture sketch helps keep my drawing dynamic even as I refine over top of it!

- I duplicate layers A LOT for safekeeping my previous progress, especially if I'm thinking of making a big change (ex. changing limb position)

If I wanna put colors down underneath it I set my lineart to Multiply. For coloring I'm very inconsistent with the process, but recently I've been using a more subjective coloring style, where I pick my own shadows and highlights to try relying less on blending modes (which is gonna be too long to get into here;;) Finally if I feel like it, I make a layer on top of my lineart layer where I render everything

Oh this is something that helps me a lot for colors! I have 2 layers that are a mid-gray tone placed above all my other layers. One I set to the Color mode (to make the drawing black and white), and the other I set to the Luminosity blending mode (to make the drawing's brightness the same..?not sure)

The Color layer helps me check if I have enough contrast in values, and the Luminosity layer helps me check if I have enough contrast in color hue and saturation!

style:

This is really difficult to answer because style encompasses so many different aspects of art, but I'll try to focus my answer on the mix of cartoonism and realism that you mentioned!

I struggled trying to explain what my style is like so I just broke down one of my drawings that exemplifies a lot of my stylizations! Hopefully these can give you some pointers about what I tend to think about when I draw (click for higher quality)

(+to add to this i use a brush with no size pressure, only opacity pressure)

What I recommend for stylizing a realistic character: The way I learned to stylize a more realistic character like this one was to import a reference of his face, then trace over it very deliberately, making sure to stick to big shapes and characterizing details I thought were important to achieve his likeness! Then I'd turn the reference layer off and freehand it over and over, comparing and redrawing until I managed to get the mix of accuracy and stylization I liked!

What I recommend to find a style: I basically ended up with my style subconsciously as an intersection between the things I like to see in art + the things I like to draw! Most of my inspiration comes from anime (😔) and artists online. I'll see a very specific stylization I like in others' art, and try replicating it to see if I like how it fits with my style + if I enjoy drawing it in that way. I did this a lot over the years, accumulating into a big mosaic of inspiration from all the artists whose work I personally enjoy and learn from! I know this isn't exactly answering how to get a style like mine, but I think knowing this general process may help you out in the long run!

ahh i think that's it! i tried to be as comprehensive as i could without being too verbose (my bane). i hope this is the answer you were looking for and that it can help you! 💞 and thank u for the ask! it was a good exercise for myself to analyze my own art

[k0nstanta]

hii!! i was wondering if I could ask what is your usual colouring process? how much time one fully coloured piece and doodle take! I adore your ocs so much they inspire me to draw more myself:3 they feel so alive!

hi anon! thank you vey much, i'm very happy to hear that you feel inspired!

i wrote up a little something for your questions under the cut:

so, first of all, the way i color things ranges from drawing to drawing, especially if i feel like playing around in the process. sometimes i decide to try something out (palette, filter, technique, brush etc) and if i really like how it looks i may recolor the entire drawing lol. point is, there's a lot of sidetracks to my process (especially now, since i'm trying to get used to a different art program than the one i used previously) but the very basics of it are as follows:

1. i sketch and line whatever it is that i want to draw (this might take a while depending on whether i have a solid idea right away or not; in the latter case i might do some thumbnails first to figure out how i want the drawing to look. you can't really see here, but when i line things i usually draw on the same layer as the sketch, and after i'm done i adjust the brightness/contrast settings of the layer to get rid of the sketch underneath. it might seem like i'm just making my life harder this way, especially since this method only works if you sketch with a lighter color (or make it lighter in settings before starting lineart) and your lineart is drawn with a solid opaque brush (which is how i always draw), but it helps me to not get caught up on trying to make the lineart precisely follow the sketch. it also makes changing things on the go much easier, since i only have to erase on one layer.

2. after i'm done lining, i underpaint with a solid color (usually the skin color, but sometimes something random), then block the alpha channel and color over it with flats;

3. i don't color everything at once, instead going piece by piece, which helps to keep the drawing balanced color and contrast wise. i pick a desired area with magic wand and then go about rendering it properly (which usually involves adding some value variance with an airbrush and then laying down shadows/highlights/etc). you can't see this here either, because for some reason i forgot to do it this once, but i also usually lower the opacity of the lineart layer halfway when i color. it helps me concentrate on colors and how they look together better;

4. when i'm satisfied with color, i recolor the lineart to be whatever color i think fits the piece better and change lineart layer settings to either multiply, color burn, or linear burn. after that i just play around with filters, add decorative details, and clean everything up. it's also worth noting that sometimes i starts trying out filters/effects directly while coloring because i want to explore some alternative colors or palettes; i also have a tendency to pick very pale & unsaturated colors so messing around with HSB (hue/saturation/brightness) & depth/contrast settings while coloring helps a lot.

5. cropping it & there you go!

this one took me 1,2 hours. depending on how complex the drawing is it might take me much longer (especially if im working on a commission) so i'd say my average time drawing is somewhere between 2-6 hours. if a drawing takes longer than that i break it apart into several days of work. don't draw for too long! it's bad for your health.

as for sketches, as i mentioned previously, it all depends on whether i know what i want to draw or not, and if i do, i usually just go straight at it:

this one took me 20 minutes. on average, a doodle can take anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes, more if i want to make it look fancy, but at that point it enters the vast limbo between sketch and finished piece.

that's it! sorry the gif quality is really bad, it's the best i could do. here's a video of the same stuff, hopefully in somewhat better resolution

[radiation]

gonna post progress pics from my volo painting and write a bit about my process since some1 asked for them!

excluding adjustment layers this has 20 layers in all. i wont show all of them bc some of them just have minor differences but ill show my general progress

sketch. just super loose but has enough visual clarity to be able to work off of and not have to fix issues caused by poor anatomy etc later

background color + painting under sketch. to choose colors, i go on the color wheel and just kinda choose colors freely and almost randomly & paint w them by very lightly pressing with a hard round elliptical opacity brush set to a large size, blending other colors on top of them this way. i dont use this brush the whole way through but honestly i couldve and it still wouldve turned out good

a lot of trial and error but because were doing it so loosely its pretty easy to find something that works quickly (also sorry the painting is so dark at this point oops)

developed painting a bit more and upped saturation in some places using an adjustment layer.

to get a lot of the color variations im getting here, i colorpick from other areas of the piece, ie colorpicking from the face and using it as subtle lighting for the hair, seeing i like how those colors look, and using that as a jumping off point and using a more intense pink for the hair shading. you can also see i got some of the yellowish on the sleeping bag or whatever tf he has on his back from the hair/hat/etc, just brushed it on there really lightly and it looks cool. another place i like to colorpick from is where the sketch overlaps with the colors underneath, it creates some interesting desaturated colors.

you can also see im developing linework a tiny bit here, its pretty early on and a lot of it will be painted over later anyways but i start being like, okay the 3d forms i've been making are working, let's draw on top of the sketch a bit to encapsulate those areas

but yeah uhh definitely a lot of this is just testing stuff out when i'm this early in the painting, i am aaaalways in motion, never stopping and just working off of instinct and what looks cool. and if i mess something up, i can just erase it and i'll have the layer underneath to fall back on.

also im just straight up not thinking about anything at this point unless im trying to closely replicate a reference image, which i didnt do very much. i use reference for eeeeeeverything i make. i took a pic of myself at a similar angle to this and then loosely based the sketch off of it, looked at pics of volo, later on looked at some reference of how ppl paint fabric, grabbed some pics of how i drew one of my ocs who makes a similar expression w his eyes, grabbed images of other digital paintings i'd made! because i wanted to work in a certain style i'd done maybe only twice before. for reference images, i use pureref, which i would highly recommend to any artist, especially ones without dual monitors (like me). basically just allows you to make a reference board and pin it on the very top of your screen

just developed more in the same fashion, then threw a couple adjustment layers over it. i toned back some of these adjustments later but yeah. you can see the lineart really starting to come together, a lot of the color variation on it colorpicked from accidental overlapping colors that ended up looking cool. btw i need to make it clear i do lineart and rendering on the same layers. also i did the stripes on the pack just by using a multiply layer, then giving it more love on the layer immediately above it so it doesnt look cheap

more rendering, got a vignette going w a multiply layer. actually started using reference for fabric folds. theyre really simply done honestly and dont look like. amazing. but they work

painted over the vignette in the background to make it a bit more interesting & not just a gradient, more rendering as usual, threw in some subtle highlights to make it a little more interesting! i probably couldve gone further with them honestly. also decided to do a really subtle outline around him cuz it looks cool. lineart is basically done at this point and this is where i started to think i was just about done

desaturated it a little bit, re-added some details i forgot about, generally fiddled with stuff and corrected some mistakes, added signature. and its DONE. i think this took me about four-four and a half hours? yeah something like that

other general notes:

-probably favorite part of this is the sleeping bag or whatever the hell that thing is on his backpack

-not entirely happy with how i did the fluffy part, it has some really cool color shifts but it doesnt feel like a proper 3d form all the way through to me. definitely pretty 2 dimensional in spots, but i was like eh i dont care enough to fix it

-although i think the pose works well enough, its definitely another example of me using pretty static poses and basic composition in my art. which isnt too terrible but i really need to start getting outside of my comfort zone on that stuff. this definitely couldve looked cooler if i developed the pose more and did better foreshortening but i didnt cuz that shiht is hard to me. im really awful at foreshortening

-on that same note, i worked off of the first sketch i made and didnt warm up beforehand which you do NOT want to do. thumbnail stuff out and make multiple sketches. 80% of the time the sketches following the first one will be better

-IM NOT AN EXPERT lots of stuff i still need to learn dont follow this 1:1

OVERALL im really satisfied with this though especially for how quickly it took me to make it. & i hope this was interesting, lmk if you have any more questions on my process !