Art Sketches + Ramblings

Hey all, here I'm sharing sketches for the Yukari/Kaine/Korone arts I just posted. Hopefully they'll be of some interest/insight.

You may notice that the "sketches" look pretty different so that's what I'm going to be talking about.

Yukari:

The first image included is the sketch. ...Yep, that's it. Just a quick map in of her body and face. The second image is the final lineart. There's no magic getting from A to B, just using the digital medium to skip/merge a skip. 

After the base lay-in to plan out the body, traditionally you would draw over it (with pencil) to place and refine all the details. This would be the final sketch which you would then ink over. When working digitally, we can combine this sketch stage with the final inking by just jumping in and drawing overtop with pen as we can erase or undo anything. This works out pretty well but it does have some pitfalls. Perhaps unsurprisingly as even with the ability to fix any mistake, you're attempting to draw final lines off of nothing.

Kaine:

I used basically the same process here as I did for Yukari. The first image is the first rough sketch, the second image is an intermediate stage as I was working through and cleaning lines, and the third image is the final image. As a side note, you see some variant of this process used by a lot of professional digital artists (though I'm sure it's universal to an extent). I more or less learned it from videos of Soejima (Persona Character Designer/Artist). All in all, it's probably best reserved for professionals with solid fundamentals haha.

I do use this process for all the Patron requests. I think it works out for the most part.

Korone:

The sketch here is clearly much more complete. This is more how a tradtional sketch would be done with all the details actually fleshed out (though I forgot the tail lol). The lineart was done on a completely separate layer overtop as opposed to cleaning up the sketch itself. The perks to this are: 

1. Everything is planned out more thoroughly.

2. You can focus on the quality of the lines as it's own, separate stage.

3. It can actually be faster (since you're not overly worried about the quality of the sketch).

All in all, this is the method I hope to use for my more complete arts going forward. Right now, I just believe it's a good habit and will lead to better artwork for my current skill level. Ultimately, that's all any of this ever is and what makes it art instead of science. Whatever enables you to sit down and draw more :)

...I hope this was coherent lol