#i love shading by literally just slapping an overlay layer and erasing parts of it LMAO

[missholoska]

Have you ever considered making a YouTube channel? I would love to see the process of making your art!

I do think it’d be nice to make speedpaints but I currently don’t have any kind of video recording or editing programs with which to make them, ahah… also I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch a speedpaint without some music on said video, and there is the small issue of youtube and copyright and all the songs I like presumably being Very Copyrighted

so it’s not a possibility I’d write off forever, but I don’t know how I’d make it happen right now :’>

but if it’s my art process you’re interested in, I can at least go through that step-by-step with some screenshots!

step 1: draft! usually either a very tiny chibi or barely more than a stick figure, my art always starts like this so I can figure out the pose without spending like an hour on a full-sized sketch that doesn’t even work in the end

this then gets resized to whatever size I want the final picture to be:

drawing at that size usually means the anatomy is pretty wonky though, and the lines are too thick and blurry to be much help for the actual lineart. if a background is vital to the whole piece it’ll get drafted here too, but with space backgrounds like in this I can just fit it in around the characters. (that’s generally terrible art advice though, please do not do as I do :’D)

step 2: sketch! still very rough, but a lot easier to work with later. I do anatomy sketches as I go but there’s rarely any need to keep those layers

I don’t usually “colour” sketches like this but knowing I’d be sharing this I wanted to make it more readable, since this is still what I would consider an unpresentable mess not worth posting uvu;;

(also if I’m doodling, this part sorta gets skipped in favour of just letting the lines be a bit sketchier and rougher than usual)

step 3: lineart! literally the worst part always.

it’s worth it in the end, but… yeah this isn’t ever the point where I’m like “yes this is a Good Picture that I Will Be Happy With :)”

(I do lineart with SAI’s default pencil brush at a size of 3 to 5, opacity around 75%, if that’s of any interest)

step 4: flat colours! I have probably the slowest possible way of doing this, but after how tiring lineart is I find it pretty relaxing taking my time filling each colour in under the lines. every individual colour gets its own layer so they can all be shaded individually too

if I’ve drawn the same character in that same outfit before this is also where I’ll do the line colours, but those rely on being darker than the shading of each colour, so for a character or outfit I’ve not drawn before that can’t be done until after the shading. fortunately not the case here!

generally shading would be next, but there also comes a point where I have deal with the background now or I’ll be even more frustrated by it later, so - step ???: background! whether I do it lined or lineless pretty much just depends on if there’s any straight lines involved

…backgrounds are kinda too individual to explain in general, but for this specific one all the starry details are luminosity layers. stars are done with this brush but I do quite a bit of erasing and hand-drawing stars too, and I use SAI’s default brush set to spread for galaxies

step 5: shading! aka the best part, the point where I go “oh hey this looks decent actually. when did that happen”

my usual shading style is every colour gets 2 darker shades and 1 lighter shade, each shade getting its own clipping layer attached to each colour. this was more obvious when I used to cel shade but soft shading makes my art look so much better ahah

step 6: layer effects! multiply and luminosity layers have been my go-to for the past 4 years, but I can’t believe I only realised how good overlay layers are in the last year and a half. they’re so good

here’s the specific effects being used here:

aaand step 7: final touches! usually consists of any glowy outlines, text or things that need blurring in photoshop, a final luminosity layer at around 10 to 20% opacity for extra highlights (especially needed for dark scenes like this, those darker layer effects tend to make the regular highlights from the shading less vibrant), slap a watermark on there and call it done

and then you’re ready for step 8: spend an hour staring at every pixel for mistakes, before spending another hour fighting the anxiety about posting it

bonus: even though I can’t make a speedpaint I can throw all those screenshots into a poor quality gif for you to watch, at least!

one final thing I can mention: not including the draft and sketch layers or all the parts of the advent calendar windows, just the finished art itself - this is made up of 102 layers. and that’s with me merging a lot of layers because SAI has a layer limit and takes an eternity to save if there are too many. people who can draw a whole piece on a single layer confuse and frighten me

#anonymous #holoskart asks #holoskart rambles #honestly my art process is just a bunch of weird habits I wouldn't recommend imitating :'D but I hope this is interesting enough?? #also sorry for taking a while to answer this! I probably could've used a piece I'd already finished to explain all this #but it seemed better to work on something with the intention of showing each part of it #long post // #wip