#trying out rendering/shading on characters lmk if it looks good

[microsofttothemax]

wanted to draw a slightly older mikey on the good timeline!! i feel like he grows a good head of hair now that hes not stressed 24/7

[princeoferror]

The Great Sky Islands

Are you any good at environments? Lmk if you have any advice :p

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Progress pics below!

Sketch:

The first part in this piece actually wasn't drawing, I got totk up and explored the main sky islands a bit, doing some location scouting. So the sketch here is me replicating the screenshot I took. Some of the scale could be off slightly as how I'd usually get proportion by my anatomy knowledge, an environments scale is all relative to each element in it, which for me is harder to get super accurate. I'm still happy with this though, considering I'm out of my element here.

Line art:

For the line art I did the same as in my last post of the tingles balloon fight fanart, of making the lines thinner the further away they are.

Flats:

This pallet is all blues and dark yellows, then rauru can pop with his white hair and the teal ghost colour.

Finished render:

The shading is definitely a step in the right direction I can see a lot of potential in myself to soon be able to make good environments if I keep practicing like I have here. It's reminiscent of anime so I'll look into the backgrounds in anime and see if I can find some good style references. I did get self conscious and blur this for depth but I think I was trying to hide my work a bit.

I'm proud of myself and this piece though, ive done a descent job of sticking to my reference and getting all those details in there. I think it's mainly missing texture, more detailed backgrounds would help my simplistic characters pop more, think of how Ghibli looks, so I just need to work in that direction.

But let me know what you think, especially if you have advice for me I rly value feedback

if you wanna help out reblogging this post would do wonders. I also do commissions if you wanna message me about that

Oki tysm for reading! bieee!!

[jacketpotatoo]

A step-by-step look at my drawing process (commission edition) ✨

1) My client ( in this case @/brxkenvalley; ig) gives me their pitch and references. In this case, I was asked to draw their oc in whatever pose I thought would suit them and so I came up with these:

They’re very rough and I focused more on gesture and expression than getting the details right. I also asked them questions clarifying some of their designs and their personality traits (which is a really helpful thing for commissioners to provide so that the artist has a better grasp on the character)

2) my client then asked for C. with an altered expression resembling B. so I made minor alternations to the draft and they decided on the one on the right

3) After approval, i sketch out the character and I’ve taken to just cleaning up my sketch instead of doing lineart because that saves a lot of time

The annotations are me asking for some design clarifications because I wanted to make some alternations so that the piece looked better/more complete (esp cuz I thought straight horns did not look very good on the hat). The quick greyscale shading was just a temporary placeholder to separate the elements clearly. As for references, I use a combination of many from google and from pictures I’ve taken myself. For example, the hands here are based partly on an online reference, partly from my own hand, and partly from muscle memory of me practicing and knowing how to make a hand look like it makes sense

4) flats. This was tough because the reference I was given had the character’s whole colour scheme as similar shades of very dark grey and so I took some creative liberty to adjust the colours a little to make the separate parts pop out more

You can also see the horn fix and added details on the hat. Not much else to say except I stuck very much to cool colours for the whole thing to fit the character’s mysterious vibes

5) Rendering/painting. Everything prior to this was done on procreate but my brushes on Clip Studio Paint are just far superior so rendering was done there

This is what takes the longest and is where I merge my sketch and flats layer and paint over everything (with the help of the magic tool and lasso tool to select segments according to colour). I think it might’ve taken around 4 hours? I used a lot of different brushes to try and get a varied texture and when I was satisfied, I exported it back over to procreate for colour correcting using different layer types and their in-built adjustment tool. I also used an add-glow correction layer with an airbrush on the white parts it pop out more, as well as give the character a more ethereal look

6) I ask my client if they want any minor changes and if not, I’ll email the file to them :)

And that’s my commission process! I don’t do all of these steps when I’m working on personal art (esp the planning) but occasionally, when I have a clear idea for a more complicated piece, I find planning really helpful. I could also do a process thing for a background piece if anyones interested, just lmk. Also feel free to ask questions if you have any and I hope this was clear!