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 👁👄👁