solarbyte artfight process

I went through a few different sketches and options for this one so I thought it might be fun to show some of the step by step for it!

the first sketches had kirie more visible-

I really liked the last one but I simply could not figure out how to pose april's legs clearly! so more sketching. 

ended up with more of april showing, since kirie's pose was the easier one to read when covered up.

tried out a different pose with the left sketch which probably reads much clearer... but it was boring to me and didn't capture the feeling I wanted of kirie pulling april forward, so I ended up with the one on the right!

smooth sailing until I got to shading and had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do haha. so I went with classic strong warm white lighting. first I put down a light cream colored fill layer on multiply at 100% opacity for a darker base-

and then I had a think about where the light source should be (which I usually try to consider earlier but I am very naughty during artfight)

my gut feeling was that the light should come from the top/almost behind them, to help give the sense that they're going down-

but then I felt like some of the visually important parts (their faces & held hands) weren't highlighted enough... so I tried lighting it from the side-

I don't know how to explain that my brain just didn't like this one. so, I tilted the first option a bit, and forgot to take a screenshot of the next step so we skip straight to the shading added too-

the darker shadows were added with a dark reddish brown color on multiply at 100% opacity, and the lighter ones were added directly to the flat color layers. and then I messed around with shapes for the background yay (:

let me know if you want to see more process step by steps like this, I'll try to include more steps of the shading process if there's interest!