Wouldn't You Be Warmer Next To Me?

 

 

There is a small percentage of you who went "Wait, what the fuck?" after seeing this image. I will explain.

This week I wanted to focus on painting. I've been really stunned by the art of Humankind and recently watched a video on their process. Really interesting, but to emulate this I would have to learn 3D. I don't know 3D.

So, long story short, this is a paintover of a Skyrim screenshot, with some potentially-familiar props in the background. I installed some pose mods and set this up. An interesting workflow, but it has some pretty significant drawbacks, namely:

• The Skyrim engine makes composing a scene really hard. I originally wanted to set up a sex scene, but the NPC kept wandering off and I decided to make do. Wrangling the engine wasn't what I wanted to practice. There were some automatic headtracking issues as well.
  
• Even with high-quality graphics mods, the colors are fairly muddy and low-contrast (excuses, excuses...)
  
• Skyrim characters are inhuman abominations with broken skeletons and weird proportions--specifically, their heads are fairly small.

That said, this was the easiest time I've had drawing hands in my life. I also had success with painting (both the character and the background). The 3D reference helped with that, sure, but so did my increasing skill. Very happy with that.

I'm surprised I ended up liking almost completely black lineart--I usually go in and color it, blending it in a little--but the head popped SO much more when I hid that layer, so I toned it down a bunch.

All told, this took about 6 hours. For a piece with a background (admittedly, not inked or detailed, then blurred) that's not bad, but it's way above a professional pace. I also made a promise to myself to not abuse the undo key while inking, so that part took 3x faster. Once I forced myself to take my time and go slow, I was a lot more accurate and controlled. Next week I hope to practice faces--I feel my style slipping a bit, and InCase posted today after a long absence, so I feel pretty inspired. I've noticed most of my recent pieces all have the subject with their mouth open slightly, which is a little sexy but also a little 👁👄👁

Thick Lady

 

Experimented with an even simpler coloring style. Did both of these in like 6 hours, which is a lot faster than the previous one. Still not fast enough to do comics, though that'll come with practice. 

The biggest and most important part of my process here was reference. I used two primary reference photos--one by nnnneko666 and one by bunnyrhodes--though I ended up using many more. You can see how useful it was...all hands but the leftmost were drawn with reference and you can see how bad it is compared to the others. Finding good reference is hard, but it's absolutely necessary unless you're a pro at inventing anatomy.

Takeaways/self-crit:

• The boobs on the left are too huge! I think this came from combining two disparate pieces of reference. I thought it was good until I finished it and came back.
• My linework is still garbage. Every line I make I crtl-Z it like 5 times or more. This is an awful habit and one I should get to work breaking immediately.
  
• Fat is hard to draw! It doesn't connect to bone and muscle in a way I'm used to. This was good practice.

Fat girls, if you're reading this I want you to know that the little hint of tummy that shows on the outside of high leg panties/other lingerie makes me go awooga like a 1950s cartoon character. That's all.

Gym Babe

Jokes aside, here's the illustration. It's pretty good.

Wanted to practice coloring, instead did the best secondary forearm anatomy of my life. Everything I wanted came across, from the pose to the mild look of distaste on the subject's face. Why am I like this?

This took about 7-8 hours over the course of an entire weekend. I didn't push myself too hard, thankfully, and had fun. Some takeaways:

• Flat colors are very cool and good, but my shape and line control leaves a lot to be desired. It's pretty messy. The core shadow-subsurface scattering technique is pretty useful. Will I ever study rendering? Yes. But right now, I'm having a lot of success with this technique, which is easy and convenient.
  
• Use reference 100% of the time.
• My composition is weak and I end up using tricks like vignetting and blur to prop it up.
• Next time I want to study color, do the following two things to make sure I'm not unfocused:
• Copy from a better artist. I can learn to invent color when I understand it better.
• DON'T WASTE TIME ON BACKGROUNDS YOU FOOL!

I'm happy I can make stuff that looks good at this point! I'd like to push for 1 finished illustration per weekend but who knows if I can keep that pace up.