March MOTM: Saint of a Distant Galaxy - painting process video // nsfw

watch the process video for the march MOTM painting by downloading the .mov file attached below!

the best part of this whole process was that the day i did the sketch, i was so ... in tune with how anatomy works? i'm sure other artists know the feeling. some days it's like you've forgotten everything you ever learned about drawing bodies (or any other subject) and you struggle to produce even a decent-looking stick figure. but other days you're artistically invincible and can draw any body part, from any angle, posed in any way whatsoever. i nailed the pose at the first attempt and as i was drawing the body, every part of this monster just seemed to materialise magically. in other words, doing the sketch and lineart was a breeze. i am especially proud of the torso, hips, and legs!

the concept art for this design is a bit unusual in that it has a background that isn't just plain white. that's because i found it easier to figure out the colour palette for the character if i included a backdrop from the very beginning. consequentially, i already had the colour scheme for the painting figured out, which made a huge difference when working with such vibrant hues.

i filled in the different areas (veil, body, cloth pieces) with a base colour and then started adding the various undertones, not least to the monster's body. i basically used different hues for areas that correspond to different muscle groups or that were to be delineated by the pink lines. for example, their pecs have a reddish purple tint, while the abs and insides of the thighs are more greenish. the biceps are pale blue, while the deltoids and upper thighs are darker. the pink details and the fuchsia hue of the palms, not to mention the soles of their adorably alien-looking feet, provide a nice contrast to the otherwise blue-green tones. the shapes of their body seem pretty organic and smooth, but these "fields" of colour and the pink lines still make them look a bit robotic or artificial.

as for the veil and pieces of cloth, i added shifting hues of pink, orange, red, and white to the mantle, while the floaty fabric of the background fades from indigo to light blue to a rich ochre colour. the design commentary mentions how ribbons like these can be used to balance a composition, so i ended up adding another piece of fabric for that very reason. it's very pale and doesn't draw much attention, but it fills in some parts of the background that looked very empty. the fabric pieces lack a lineart so they look quite painterly, but i kept the shading and highlighting relatively low key -- just enough to make them look three-dimensional but without distracting too much from the character.

i added some shadows and highlights to the space saint too, and used pale and dark blues to create more contrast and differences in value. but the most challenging part of this process was including enough starry detail without making the general impression seem too busy or messy. the mantle, body, and cloth pieces are coloured like nebulae, with several different hues blending into each other and a bunch of stars scattered across each surface, to make it look like space scenery. my usual MO would have been to use a more plain colour for at least one of these three design elements, to balance the colourful and starry aesthetic of the others. but this time i wanted to go all in. the background is serene in comparison and the stars are mostly distributed in little clusters, producing some "empty spots" for the eyes to rest at in-between taking it all in.

after adding some details and cleaning up some of the barely-visible sketch layers, i started working on the saintly symbols. the arrows were pink on the concept sketch but i turned them blue in the painting, so that they'd stand out more against the character's body and veil. i drew the six floaty symbols more like neon signs than the glyph-like look of the concept sketch, and rendered the shiny effect in the same way as i did the signs of the neon aesthetic MOTM design of august 2020 -- the method is described in the associated process post.

it was easy enough to draw the stylised gloria that looks like planetary orbits, though i ended up adding a yellow tint to the innermost circle, to sort of draw focus to the space saint's face. i tweaked the contrast a little to make the colours of their body more vibrant, polished some of the details, and darkened the corners of the background to make the piece look less "flat."

as described in the design commentary, i wanted the monster's skeletal face to be covered by a sheer layer of gauze, like the skulls of some bejewelled catacomb saints. to create that effect, i kept the details of the skull to a minimum, adding only some shadows and small lines to hint at the underlying features. the white lines indicate the texture of the gauze -- but i do think the effect comes across much better on the sketch.

after adding some final details and making a few of the stars more shiny, the piece was finished! i hope you like the process video, and if you have any questions you can always ask in the comments below. :>

// art + character © me.