Leg Practice
Added 2021-02-26 22:01:20 +0000 UTCFocusing on lean leg shapes, trying to improve my understanding of the anatomy. Also practicing my color process to streamline it to something faster and more consistent.
Step 1 is the lines:
Step 2 adding grayscale shading. This is a combined step where several things are happening at once: defining areas of highlights, shadows, soft and hard edges, and reflected lighting. That might sound like a complicated way to do it, but I find it simpler to do all that at once rather than multiple passes, by only giving myself one element to control – shadows. Instead of having 4 layers for all those lighting effects, I just add and remove one layer of grayscale shading. This also carves out some more 3d shapes that weren't done with lines, like the bulge of her calf for example:
Step 3 is just adding flat colors, very simple in this case as there are only two colors, but the brightness of the colors has a big effect on the overall light/dark balance, so it's not just picking color hue but also saturation and lightness values:
Step 4 is adding soft smooth highlights, hard specular highlights, and some speckled skin texture, as well as another pass of darker shadows to give it more depth and contrast. Mostly this is done by adding a single yellowish-white highlight color with hard, soft, or speckled brush tips:
Most of the time my coloring has a lot more steps than this, but I'm working on simplifying and streamlining it so I can do colors more often without them needing to be an all-day project. This leg exercise was about an hour start to finish.
