The creative process of one of my pictures.

Hey guys, i wanted to bring you a little bit of my workflow when I make one of my pictures. This time is one of my pictures.

In the particular case of the pic that I'm gonna show you how I made, it all started with a silly idea of a screen background for my phone.

After that I started to develop the idea in my small sketchbook, which is so tiny, basically the length of my pencil.

I know that some artists can sketch 30 ideas in an hour. That is totally not my case. I sketch one idea just if I'm in the mood, so, this next page was made in 2 or maybe 3 days. And I want to emphasize that point since many artists believe that they are bad just for not being able to make an industrial amount of drawings in a short time. If you are very slow, believe me, I am like you.

As you can see, it just took 1 more sketch to give up on my original idea and start to explore a next idea what is a wallpaper for my PC.

But after these sketches, my next idea gave a 180° turn. I thought, "Oh!, that looks loke a low angle, as if she would waking you up for a nap or something". Then I thought: "That would look like a cool CG into the visual novel". So, I started to make another sketches for the new idea.

Now that I had a clear idea of what I wanted I started the sketch in the PC.

Here is another important point that I wanna emphasize and is the fact that you don't have to stick into your original idea with your teeth and nails, It's also cool to let it evolve and see what kind of route it will take. And that is not something of "Mister interesting" shit.

In my case was just that I wasn't comfortable with my original idea and I started to so something that in makes me keep drawing. I tried several times the "Pro artist" thing of: "You NEED to make that original idea" cause otherwise it means that you don't know how to draw.

At the moment I gave up on that mentality, everything started to flow much better for me. So, with this main idea better understood for me, I started the same rough/silly sketch on my PC.

As you can see I don't go super detailed at the begining. The MOST important part in here is to set the idea of what do you want. If you start focusing on the anathomy, facial expression, vanishing point direction, light source, etc, etc, you'll end up breaking your mouse and yelling that you're a fraud at drawing while crying. So, the most important part in here is to set the main idea.

The more basic your drawing the better, and if you have horrible anatomy here, dot eyes or balloon head, guess what? That's the good shit.

After that, I just start to fix some little things that I'm not comfortable with like, in this case, the mouth height, the pupil's position, and the left elbow.

Now, all the things that I had to care from the begining are reduced.Now I just ned to care about a better anathomy and a cute expresion, not all the stuff at the same time. Having what I wanted, I can finally start making a better sketch with a lot of details on it.

In this point many people tells me like: Dude, that pic is ready, don't keep sketching, that's not a sketch at all, that's a complete drawing. And maybe they're right, but my problem is that if I don't go very carefully, the final result ends up in something that I need to fix constantly.

And now, with this last sketch ready that also have small details like small eyelashes and such I can finally start to make the lineart.

My process in the lineart has like another 5 steps 🤣 but I will put it in just one step to not to make this post eternal.

In my particular case, the end of the lineart is basically the end of the hard work, beyond this point I have like 2 hours of work or maybe less.

I have this color palette that I made for Samara that makes me go faster when coloring her. I just put this color palette on the document and just need to pick the color every time.

In the lineart process I decided to make the nose shape with shadows instead of a lineart process because she is looking at you directly and she is not at a slight angle.

This process is basically imagining where the light source is and start working from there. I will explain that in a future post.

After that I added the shines, and color degrees in the shadows. I need to add the eye shines just at this point cause they react at the source light.

Indoors renders are another beast that I can explain in another post, but basically at this point I just fix the camera several times with rough renders until I reach a good angle for my drawing.

The color saturation, slight blur and colored light is a MUST if you wanna reach that Anime look & feel.

And before adding the background I just added some color fixes and light sources with the Visual Novel logo and...

VOILÁ!

Something I want to make very clear with this post is that; If you are an artist or even someone who writes or does any type of art like modeling, writing, 3D or things like that, you SHOULD NOT feel like your ENTIRE process has to look professional. Stupid social media makes us think that a sketchbook is a notebook that must have pages full of perfect works of art or else you should retire from art.

I started to improve the moment I didn't care that my things turned out ugly and when I didn't care how long it took me to make a single piece or how the original idea ended up evolving.

The point of everything is to have fun and have a good time doing something that should make you happy instead of adding more stress to your life.

In the case of this image it took me approximately 9 or 10 hours to finish it. But it was 10 hours spread over 5 business days without counting the weekend.

So don't take everything they say on social media literally.

The brain is very literal when taking the information that is given to it, so if I say that it took me 10 hours to make this drawing, the brain will interpret it as that I started at 9:00 am and finished at 7: 00 pm of the same day.

So, if you are creative, take things with creativity and fun, and not as an obligation to prove to the world that you are someone. The world doesn't care about you and it doesn't care if you're even dead, so; Why should you care what the world thinks of you?

Just have fun doing what you love.