September MOTM: queen bee - painting process // nsfw

here's the process pack for september's monster of the month painting, depicting a queen bee and her human (...?) lover. download the attached .zip to get access to 14 pngs and 1 gif!

we all know that, regardless of the genders involved, i'm very weak to the 'lorg monster tops smol human' aesthetic. but this month i decided it was time to switch it up and draw the big monster getting loved on by the comparatively small human instead. i figured out a pose which showed off the queen bee's wings, tail, face, and fancy feet, aka the parts of her design that i though was most important and/or interesting to showcase. the trickiest part was that i wanted both their faces to be clearly visible--at first i had the human mushing their face against her chest, but then i decided to have them glance backwards instead. i did feel like the outstretched wings and the curve of her tail set the composition off balance a bit, but i fixed it by adding the floral background.

this turned into one of those precise and thin linearts, a bit sketchy at places but fairly detailed and clean. the lineart was on three layers; their bodies, the wings, and the flowers, which would make it easier to mess around with the colours and transparency of each section. for the same reason i added the basic flats to three different layers as well--one for the human, one for the queen bee's body, and one for her wings.

next i started blocking in the colours of the queen bee, starting with bigger chunks of colour and moving on to smaller and smaller areas. after adding the stripes i started experimenting with how i wanted to render her body, which wasn't all that easy to figure out. i tried using textured brushes to add painterly shadows, highlights, and details, but it just looked pretty messy and confusing. i realised that it was because her body has a relatively complex and high-contrast colouration, with all those shades of black, gold, brown, and yellow distributed in stripes and bands across her body. adding painterly texture, shadows, and highlights made it look too jumbled and busy, if that makes sense. for the sake of clarity i figured that it would be better to keep the rendering relatively simple. i added some vague 'streaks' of highlights, following the shapes of her body, and used them as guidelines for adding some subtle shifts in colour that gave her limbs more form.

i also started colouring the wings (now is when i lowered the transparency of that part of the lineart, making the wings look more sheer and transparent) and the human. next i finished the pastelly flowers of the background in a very simple fashion (flat colours + some darker gradients) and changed the colour of the flower lines to a dark pink. 

after that i added the shadows, on a new layer that i had set to 'multiply' and with the transparency lowered to an appropriate level. i used a dark reddish brown and the lasso select + airbrush method, and i'm very pleased with how the shadows added some punch to the relatively simple colouring of the characters.

but i think it was the next step that made the biggest difference for this picture: i added a subtle wash of pale purple to the parts of their bodies that were closer to the background and overlapped by others. it's a tried-and-true method i've often used to make an image easier to read. at the same time i also airbrushed in some warm overlays, mostly to warm up her colours a bit but it also helped increase the readability of the pose. as did using a really pale pink to add some stylised lighting on a layer also set to 'overlay.' 

finally i switched to a tiny brush and spent a fair bit of time polishing the whole drawing up, adding details, and cleaning up the lineart. at this stage i realised i had forgotten her collar of detached insect wings, and after adding that it was only a matter of adjusting the levels to brighten the picture up a bit. 

on a closing note, please ignore how yellow the background looks in the gif. as you can see on the PNGs it's actually plain white, but converting them into a gif apparently messed up the colours a bit.

// art + characters © me.