PROCESS PACK: cream-filled bun // nsfw

here’s the process pack for this painting of weshau and minoru! download the attached .zip to access 15 pngs and 1 gif.

reflecting on how i painted this piece made me want to bring up something that i’m pretty sure i’ve talked about once or twice before but that bears repeating: letting my mood dictate which style i’m using for any given picture. 

as i was starting this piece i really didn’t feel like dealing with super precise lines or tons of tiny details. sometimes i love doing crisp and intricate linearts, using a tiny brush to draw really thin and exact lines and spending hours adding details and refining the piece. other times my lineart is little more than a rough sketch, drawn with a big brush in a more ‘carefree’ way and serving as flexible guidelines for a more painterly colouring style. i love the look of both approaches equally and again, choosing which style to go with mostly depends on my mood. other factors that come into play is if any particular style would be best suited for the piece i’m working on or the characters depicted, whether i’m experimenting with new methods or brushes, and the art program i’m using (how familiar i am with it and the available tools and brushes).

but it really mostly depends on what i feel like doing at the moment, and i try to follow my gut feeling and inspiration rather than forcing myself to use a particular style or technique if i don’t feel like it. i personally enjoy having many different methods and styles at my fingertips, being very flexible in how i go about creating my drawings and paintings. when i first got serious about art i used to stress about defining, refining, and perfecting ‘my’ style, as if i was only allowed to have one; one look, one method, one technique. i kind if thought that the key to creative confidence laid in unlocking or designing ’my’ style and that everything would be easy once i had figured out or curated ‘my’ method and technique, as if i would stick to it my whole life. i got almost obsessive about it and i remember feeling frustrated when ‘my’ style kept eluding me.

nowadays i just do whatever i want and it’s incredibly freeing. i have many styles, methods, and techniques, and they are constantly shifting, changing, developing, and evolving, sometimes little by little and sometimes more obviously so. i encourage myself to experiment and try new things—or return to old favourites. i don’t feel an urge to define or perfect anything, and funny enough my art still has a distinct look. turns out i didn’t need to design or curate my style—it evolved naturally, through years of creating art. fancy that.

aNYWAY, back to the painting at hand. in THIS case you can see how both the sketch and the ‘lineart‘ are pretty rough, drawn with relatively big brushes and imprecise strokes. i immediately lowered the transparency of the lineart quite drastically, underlining how the rough lines would serve more as guidelines while colouring, rather than playing much of a role in the final image. 

next i added the basic flat colours and starting adding gradients, like so often before. weshau’s coat ranges from very dark to pale blues, and as always it’s both fun and challenging to colour him. i especially love how the furry tendrils of his mane overlap and intertwine, but it can also be tricky to make sense of that mess. the key often lays in distinguishing the hues and values of the overlapping parts from one another. note, for example, how the dark tone of his hand and lower arm pose a contrast to both his stomach and leg and to minoru’s body, and how the pale hues of the tendrils contrast against his chest and head. as for the tendrils specifically i try to distinguish the shape and colour of each individual part, giving them a dark or pale tip to create contrast, and adding the darker ‘overside’ of the tendrils to make them look like threedimensional, squirming shapes.

minoru’s body is coloured in a similar way; see for example how his lower arm subtly contrasts his upper arm, how his shin is slightly darker than his thigh, and the difference in value on each side of the faint line of musculature down the middle of his torso.

i kept the shading pretty simple because i find that carefully colouring each body part as described above gets a lot of the job done in terms of creating an impression of form and depth. i defined weshau’s musculature and added some small, deep shadows (as well as highlights) at certain places, like for example weshau’s right hand and his foot.

i kept adding details and refining the image, and it’s only now that i had the colouring figured out that i went over the lines again. the initial rough lineart has basically ‘melted’ into the colouring but at this point i created a new layer and drew new lines where appropriate, using a somewhat smaller brush that allowed me more precision and that came out looking more neat. note how at places i’m also adding some pale lines running alongside the darker lines, further distinguishing each ‘side’ of the line from each other.

it’s finally time for my favourite part of this process, as shown in steps 12-14. i wanted to give the characters more depth, making the pose easier to read and creating atmosphere, and i did it by adding two faded ’layers’ of the same ochre colour as the background. first i selected the parts of the characters that are furthest away from the viewer: weshau’s tail, the tendrils emerging from the right side of his head, his right hand, and minoru’s left leg and arm. i used a big airbrush to add the ochre hue and kept the layer setting to ‘normal’ but lowered the transparency until the faded effect looked just right. i also selected the area right behind weshau’s left arm and added a yellow tint to his thigh, stomach, foot, and tail. this was the ‘first layer’ of ochre, but to further the effect i added a second layer as well, which only applied to weshau’s tail and the tendril’s at the back, making them look even more faded. to top it off i also added a faint blur to these same areas, creating a contrast between the faded and blurry background elements and the sharp and higher-contrast focal parts.

once i had increased the brightness a bit the image was finished, and i have to say i’m extremely pleased with how the atmosphere came out. you would hardly see the ‘faded’ effect in real life (except maybe in really thick fog or smoke combined with certain light conditions) but hey, i’m drawing fantastical monsters here, i don’t care much about realism.

art + weshau © me; minoru © kubi.