May MOTM: bioluminescent naga - painting process video // nsfw

here's the process video for the may MOTM painting - you can download the .mov file below!  (sorry about a sliver of it being cut off the top for the first half of the video--not sure why that happened. procreate exported it like that and i couldn't do anything about it. :/) 

this piece was challenging from start to finish, for several different reasons. first of all, i love nagas, but drawing their snake tails is such a Task™. i personally love when naga are really huge, not necessarily in terms of their human halves being oversized, but in the sense that their tails are super long. it such a cool look... but it's that much harder to draw, because you've got so much tail to deal with. i generally go into it wanting to really show off their coils, creating a neat sense of three-dimensionality by having their tail snake over and around itself in a very natural-looking way. but as you can see in the video, it usually takes me a lot of tries to get it right.

the only thing i knew for sure when i started sketching on this painting was that i wanted the naga's tail to be coiled around his lover, lifting her up. i decided do do another "aftermath moment" and show off the cum trickling out of her hole while she cleans him off with her mouth. so for starters i sketched her body, the end of his tail wrapping around her, and his torso. i'll admit that i began doing pose idea doodles before i had completely finished his design, which is why he has a cobra-esque hood for a little bit--i replaced it with the jellyfish tendrils as soon as i had his appearance fully figured out. normally i finish the MOTM design long before i start working on the painting, but since i know how challenging it is for me to draw naga, this month i "cheated" and started doing pose doodles early on.

in any case, i needed to figure out how to pose the rest of his tail. the sketchy stage of this process was quite chaotic, and the big "PHEW" in the corner marks the moment i thought i had figured it out. alas, i would soon realise i was mistaken. 

the scene is quite zoomed out and i was having issues figuring out how to draw her face from the "over the shoulder" angle, so i decided to simply add a close-up instead. that also gave me a better chance to indicate that even if his tail is snaking around her it doesn't mean he's more dominant, as might otherwise be easy to assume if one partner is "constricting" the movements of the other. so i wanted her expression to be very confident and captivating, because she's very well aware of how weak her naga is to the things she can do with her mouth... and with her hands, because i decided to give him hemipenes and that meant i hade the perfect opportunity to draw a blowjob and a handjob at the same time.

in a related vein i also re-drew the naga's head and face a few times, before i hit upon an expression that looked pleasured in a kind of soft way. aaand it took several tries to figure out how to pose his arms, too, because i wanted at least one of his hands to interact with her in a tender way. i also thought about including a close-up of his face, if nothing else to balance out the composition, since the lower left-hand corner looked very empty.

but that's when i faced the truth--i wasn't happy with his tail, so i fixed the composition by re-drawing it entirely. again. i had started colouring but still paused, enlarged the canvas, erased the length of his tail between his hips and the coiled end of it, and drew it all over again. this time i fitted his whole body onto the canvas, because it was easier to figure it out that way, and i could always crop the drawing tighter once it was finished.

at long last i was satisfied with the pose and composition, so now it was time to start colouring in earnest. guess what? that was difficult too, because of the lighting. the whole point of the prompt is that he's a bioluminescent naga and that means there's gotta be cool lighting effects. but it's not just one light source, there's many patches that glow in a pretty blue--as if it's not already hard enough to draw one light source!

first of all i laid down the base colours and focused on rendering the shape of his coiling tail. when i switched to a smaller brush and started adding the indication of a scaly texture and the bioluminescent bands i did so on new layers set to a variety of different shiny settings, like 'overlay' or 'hard light.' using cool layer effects would be the key to achieving an impression of shiny bioluminescence, but i worked on it step by step, layer by layer, rather than doing anything too drastic in one fell swoop. i decided not to worry too much about keeping the lighting realistic or ensuring it made perfect sense, because the most important thing was that it should look pretty. 

his tendrils were on a different layer from his body so i was able to work on them separately; similarly, the human's body and every part of the close-up were also on layers of their own. bit by bit i figured out how to add the lighting effect to her skin, how to really make his tendrils glow, and how to emphasize the serpentine scaling of his otherwise humanoid chest.

at one point i realised that the blue hues of the naga's body needed more variety, so i added some undertones; a slight yellow tint to the tip of his tail and the ends of his "hair tendrils;" an even more blue tone to the "midsection" of his tail; and a vague hint of purple to the parts of his tail that are the furthest away in the painting. this creates a "layered" impression where it's easier to understand the coiling of his tail, as opposed to when everything had the same blue hue and looked more like a shiny gordian knot. 

speaking of blue i gave the human woman lavender hair, because i recently find myself really drawn to people with pastel hair. i went a bit back and forth on the background throughout the process, but eventually settled on a very dark blue, because i liked the idea of drawing a bioluminescent monster against an almost black background.

for much of this process i focused mostly on the overall impression and "broader brush strokes." i wanted to get the colouring and the lighting right before i started working on the details. i eventually cleaned up the colouring, and also adjusted the hues of different parts of the lineart as i went, making it blend more and more into the colouring. towards the end i zoomed in and refined the close-up, polished the linework, and added cum. by then it had been about 4 days since i started working on this piece. the colouring and lighting was no easy task but it was re-drawing various parts of it several times over that really took the most time and effort. i'm glad i did it, though, rather than settling for a composition that looked off. it was worth it ... but i'm also glad it's done, hah.

if you have any questions about this process, i'll be happy to answer them in the comments below <3

// art + characters © me.