1) Pose

Ah okay okay teka teka (im the same anon who asked to befriend you)

I have a weird question what is your art process? And another weird question how do you color and shade your art? Im sorry if it was weird i just really like the way your art keep up the good work

Not weird at all anon!!! I will do my best to explain but I’m not entirely the best teacher, since I more feel like the best way of learning is to just keep trying stuff by yourself until you feel comfortable in what you’re doing, but I’ll give an outline of how I draw characters at least in hopes that that helps!! I’m glad you’d want to learn from like, me of all people, considering I’ve lowkey always wanted to help people with learning about art but I don’t know how to go about it since I’m entirely self-taught from speedpaints on YouTube, with some slight high school art education lol

1) pose

aka. my least favorite part. because I never know what to do here. Sometimes I scroll through google until I find something I like, because even if I have a pose idea in mind, I almost never end up liking it when it’s printed onto the screen. Reference is very good for this as well! I also highly reccomend doing gesture drawings or smaller thumbnails if you like to go through some ideas before you choose something -- unless you really like that first idea lmao. I usually just do one or two poses myself unless I’m having a really off day.

two tips I would reccomend! this falls into the gesture drawing category, but just make shapes to represent where things would go!! It makes things easier to get in perspective as well as they’re just faster to draw. It may take a bit of practice to look at things as mere shapes rather than body parts or things, but once you get the hang of it, it’ll be very handy!

I also would reccomend (although everyone i know hates this) flipping your canvas in some form! In digital it’s much easier (i have a hotkey that just horizontally flips my canvas), but in traditional media you have to be a bit more creative. The main point of this is to just look at your piece from a different perspective, because sometimes you might not notice something looks really off until you change how you’re looking at it!

I usually end up at this part with this kind of sketch. Sometimes if I’m confident enough in the pose, or it’s a headshot, I’ll skip this step altogether.

2) sketch and lineart

I’m gonna sound like one of those awful “How to Draw” books here but like... there’s not a whole lot to say here other than pretty much follow the guidelines you set for yourself and come up with a cleaner sketch, followed by lineart which, for me, is jut a final version of the sketch. I don’t really have any fancy pen I use for it -- it’s literally just a more dense and thicker version of my sketch brush lol. I made them to be similar to the pencils I use just cause it was easier for me to adapt to from traditional works, since that’s where I started.

one tip I do have though... for me, personally, and I know a lot of people who don’t like doing this! But I like to make a new layer and draw on top of the previous sketch so I don’t have to keep erasing. But you don’t have to! Some people merely work on the same layer of a sketch until they like it and then color that. This is also very normal for traditional pieces as well, since you don’t really have layers to work with unless you get another paper and trace over that (which is really annoying if you don’t have a light table.)

I also like doing some hatching for my outlines... just cause I like how it looks lol

3) flat colors

Okay so I do this really simply tbh. Basically, I select everything I want to be the background (like this)

and then invert my selection like this

And fill it in with a base color (usually it’s a skin tone of sorts but sometimes if I have multiple characters I go with a neutral tone like gray or if sometimes bright colors if the character has generally desaturated colors to their outfits. For this I’m just going to use a slightly-purple white because, well, bone lol)

Now this is a little more specific to the program I use (that being Paint Tool SAI), and over this base layer I use essentially a clipping mask layer over top the base and fill in colors where they go. That way I can be lazy and not go outside of the lines because the program does it for me~ lol

Essentially my layer setup looks like this! (but way more. this is just a brief example. also yes, I don’t name my layers, but I know a lot of people who get lost very easily like this lol)

From here I just outline where I would put the color on its seperate layer, then select everything in the outline and fill it in. I actually came up with this method semi-recently, because between AtF and ULR I needed to make a lot of art pieces really quickly, and this decreased the time it took me to do base coloring by almost half. I also break one of the “crucial” rules I was taught while learning art things this way. Usually, you’re supposed to work back-to-front, light-to-dark. But I’ve found that it’s a lot easier for me when I fill in a large area with one color, and then make layers below those, so I don’t have to keep being so intricate. My layers end up looking really blobby lol

But here’s the end result!

4) outline color

This is definitely something newer i’ve been doing, but I love it, because it really gives a much softer look to the image, and helps with the colors as well.

So, for my basic outline color, I usually use a very dark red. I don’t like to use straight black (in most cases, sometimes there’s just a character with a very dark color palette and I do go with black, but usually the surroundings are dark, too) so I just start with this red I came up with a while back.

To change this, you could just use the hue/saturation adjustment, but I’ve never been a bit fan of that. Instead, what I do is I select the original color for the outline (which is this)

And just use the outside circle to spin it to a color more suited to the piece. I’ll choose purple for this!

Then I make another clipping mask overtop the outline layer, and just fill in the whole thing with this color.

This is the end result (of this step lol, there’s still more coloring I do)! It’s pretty subtle, but sometimes it makes a huge difference.

But from here, I color outlines between where the same color is on the piece. For example, where the blue overlaps over itself on the fur or onto the boot. Usually I just kind of select the color and grab something darker and more saturated. Sometimes I adjust the color if it looks really bad lol but there’s no specifics to this. These all go in a clipping mask layer just above that purple one for the lineart.

Also, if I’m using a darker color like black (which I am here), I won’t typically go over it, because if I try to make a darker or more saturated color from it, it becomes more obvious/sticks out more than the main outline, which is not what I want. This is to make things more subtle than anything!

The flat colors then look like this! ... unless I missed an overlapping part, which happens. So often it bothers me, because i notice it IMMEDIATELY after upload lmao.

5) shading

I borderline do this differently every time. But I always have one consistency: the whole image gets put into a folder, and then overtop of that, a clipping mask with the “Multiply” mode on it.

I also tend to lean towards using a soft grey-purple or grey-pink for shading. That’s the nice thing about multiply layers, you don’t need to know at all about color theory /hj. Okay, well, sorta lol. I just am far too lazy to come up with different colors for every single color. While it’s not as bad with the characters here, most of the characters I’ve drawn in the past had very complicated designs, making shading a tedious and un-fun part of art. I’ve also just always been really bad with colors.

But essentially, when you use this overtop the whole piece, it looks like this!

Of course, for this one, I won’t have this layer like this. But sometimes if you have a darker-lit piece you’re making and like starting out with the same base colors (like, say, so you don’t get the colors wrong, so you can color-pick them from an image you already have), you can do this and leave this layer the way it is, and then make another Multiply layer on top of it.

You can also just blotch in spots you want to have shaded (typically based off of the light source, or where the light shining on your piece is coming from), something like this:

...and then erase around them to make the edges crisper and give it more depth. I usually then, for ones like this, have another multiply layer overtop of this with a gradient of shade, and then a sort of “outline” of shading, which is a multiply layer that I put only on the very edges of the current multiply layer. It sort of ends up like this:

but... y’know, better, since this is a messy example lol

But my favorite way of shading is actually kind of... “Reverse” shading. Essentially, I use the first example of the Multiply layer I showed, and erase where I want the light to hit the character. This gives it a lot more depth in the end and usually has a more intense lighting than my former example. But the former example is a lot quicker!

and cleaned up to fit the piece more...

And, since this layer on its own is actually really light, I usually go over with a couple different ones to create more depth! This is where I usually use the first method I described, just because it’s easier, and at this point, you’re really just darkening the points where much less light is hitting.

6) highlights/extra

I’m throwing the eyes in extra, because in this case, I’m gonna draw Lust’s eye glowing. Just for fun lol. But I’ll start with the highlights!

It’s actually a lame process.

Above all the multiplay layers I have, I usually make another clipping mask layer, but this one in “Screen” mode. So, it looks like this:

And then I just... make a gradient lol.

now this is way too bright, so I usually decrease the opacity of the layer so it’s more reasonable. Sometimes I adjust the location of the screen layer, so it’s covering more or less of the piece. I settled on this:

I also selected the lineart and base multiply layer for the shading and deleted anything on the screen layer in these spots, so the highlights would only be on the spot where there’s light already hitting it.

After this I do what’s called rim lighting! Which is, essentially, just putting nice bits of highlight at the edge of the lineart. I just like how it looks lol. I use another screen layer at 100% opacity above the main screen layer for this. (and I’ve actually been using @tatatale’s lineart brush for these, cause it’s a very nice and crisp yet malleable brush)

Almost done, but of course, his eye’s pretty crucial lol. I just use the same brush I use for highlights to draw eyelights, since it has a very crisp edge to it. I’ll just draw a purple heart for Lust~

and from here it’s. almost like improv. But for the most part when making glowy eyes, I use a lot of layers that are in “Overlay” mode, “Lumi&Shade” mode, and normal mode. I typically copy and paste the shape I drew in different layers, blurring it in some to make a sort of “glowing” effect. This is what I ended up with:

and then I add a simple background with an outline because I’m lazy and......

7) done!

hope this helps like... at all lol 😅😅😅 I’m not the greatest teacher in the world since I tend to forget crucial steps... so hopefully this is good for something!!!♥♥