How I Do My Drawings
Random note: My shoulder is still killing me, and exams start in two days, so if I fall off the face of the earth, that's where I went.
Anyway, the point of this post: In the past few days, several people have asked me about what program I use/how I do my drawings I've been posting, so here's a quick post giving an overview of how I do it. I decided to go ahead and post this, since I'm laid up with my bum shoulder and I just finished a pic of Sister Merissa for madmguillotine, and I have it saved in several stages still.
I mostly draw my pictures in Photoshop. Sometimes I draw them by hand, and then scan them into Photoshop for coloring.
Now, first I find a picture of the character or actor I'm basing the character on in the pose that I want them in, because I'm not good at visualizing without a direct reference. For this drawing, I used this image.
After I do that, I posterize the image, because it makes it easier to see the shapes that make up the image. Be sure you use "posterize" and not "posterize edges", because they do two different things.
Then I switch to the side by side view, so I can look at my reference image while I'm drawing. I start out with a red brush, set to the graphic pencil texture, and draw basic shapes to work from. Then I start a new layer and switch to grey and sort of start morphing out the features. I don't really have caps of those parts cause I wasn't thinking about making this post when I was doing this drawing, but yeah. Anyway.
Then I go to a new layer, and do a black brush on the same setting, and get more detailed. Then I use the smudge tool to sort of bleed the lines out to form the shadows/shading. And I use the pen tool to go back and adjust the parts that are off, by clicking around the lines and adjusting their curves and length, etc, because I don't draw as well free style.
So at this stage, I've been working for something around an hour or two, depending, and I have something that looks kind of like this:
After that I delete the guide line layers, and it looks like this:
Now, once the guide lines are gone, I can see that her shoulders are a little too wide, her left arm is kind of awkward looking, and her left boob isn't quite as full as the right one. So using the pen tool, the polygon selector tool, and the smudge tool, I move things around and touch things up until it looks like:
A lot of the shadows there are actually made from lines I messed up on. I always go for the smudge tool before the eraser, because you never know if a mistake is going to end up being a good thing if you just work it with the smudge brush a little. Now, I'm pretty happy with these lines, so it's time to color.
I put each color on a different layer, underneath the layer with the lines on it, and use the smudge tool to push colors around until they're all in the right place. Then I mess with the opacity and stuff until I like how it looks. Last, I do the background, and the shadows and highlights, all on their own layers. I typically don't have patience to draw a background, so most of my backgrounds are color gradients, or texture masks like how you would use for making icons.
So about 4-5 hours in, longer for a more complicated drawing, we end up with this:
I wanted this to look like the character had had her portrait painted, so I used a water color texture brush for her skin and her hair, and a marker texture brush for everything else. My usual problem places are hands and eyes, but I didn't include her hands in this, and I feel like I did a decent job on her eyes.
This is Sister Merissa,madmguillotine's character from the LotS FB RPG.
The end. And. There you go, people who were wondering. <3
Anyway, the point of this post: In the past few days, several people have asked me about what program I use/how I do my drawings I've been posting, so here's a quick post giving an overview of how I do it. I decided to go ahead and post this, since I'm laid up with my bum shoulder and I just finished a pic of Sister Merissa for madmguillotine, and I have it saved in several stages still.
I mostly draw my pictures in Photoshop. Sometimes I draw them by hand, and then scan them into Photoshop for coloring.
Now, first I find a picture of the character or actor I'm basing the character on in the pose that I want them in, because I'm not good at visualizing without a direct reference. For this drawing, I used this image.
After I do that, I posterize the image, because it makes it easier to see the shapes that make up the image. Be sure you use "posterize" and not "posterize edges", because they do two different things.
Then I switch to the side by side view, so I can look at my reference image while I'm drawing. I start out with a red brush, set to the graphic pencil texture, and draw basic shapes to work from. Then I start a new layer and switch to grey and sort of start morphing out the features. I don't really have caps of those parts cause I wasn't thinking about making this post when I was doing this drawing, but yeah. Anyway.
Then I go to a new layer, and do a black brush on the same setting, and get more detailed. Then I use the smudge tool to sort of bleed the lines out to form the shadows/shading. And I use the pen tool to go back and adjust the parts that are off, by clicking around the lines and adjusting their curves and length, etc, because I don't draw as well free style.
So at this stage, I've been working for something around an hour or two, depending, and I have something that looks kind of like this:
After that I delete the guide line layers, and it looks like this:
Now, once the guide lines are gone, I can see that her shoulders are a little too wide, her left arm is kind of awkward looking, and her left boob isn't quite as full as the right one. So using the pen tool, the polygon selector tool, and the smudge tool, I move things around and touch things up until it looks like:
A lot of the shadows there are actually made from lines I messed up on. I always go for the smudge tool before the eraser, because you never know if a mistake is going to end up being a good thing if you just work it with the smudge brush a little. Now, I'm pretty happy with these lines, so it's time to color.
I put each color on a different layer, underneath the layer with the lines on it, and use the smudge tool to push colors around until they're all in the right place. Then I mess with the opacity and stuff until I like how it looks. Last, I do the background, and the shadows and highlights, all on their own layers. I typically don't have patience to draw a background, so most of my backgrounds are color gradients, or texture masks like how you would use for making icons.
So about 4-5 hours in, longer for a more complicated drawing, we end up with this:
I wanted this to look like the character had had her portrait painted, so I used a water color texture brush for her skin and her hair, and a marker texture brush for everything else. My usual problem places are hands and eyes, but I didn't include her hands in this, and I feel like I did a decent job on her eyes.
This is Sister Merissa,madmguillotine's character from the LotS FB RPG.
The end. And. There you go, people who were wondering. <3