May MOTM: Heavenly naga - painting process // nsfw

download the attached .zip to access the process pack for may's monster of the month painting, feat. a heavenly naga; it contains 12 pngs and 1 gif!

i have such mixed feelings about drawing naga. i absolutely love them as a type of monster, and they're ideal for smutty art (two words: double dicks). but GOD they can be so tricky to pose! i have a high key feeling of deja vu, like i've ranted about this before, so let's not linger on it. but suffice to say i had to do a lot of trial and error sketches before i managed to figure out a pose i liked. i've included a very rough sketch, a somewhat more refined sketch, and the lineart, though you'll notice that even as i had finished the lineart i didn't delete the underlying sketch layers. i cleaned them up and lowered their transparency a lot, but i felt like the vague sketchy lines visible below the lineart helped adding shape and liveliness to the characters. 

the premise for this drawing was yushe and kang banging in yushe's spring, at a spot where the water isn't very deep. the very green, ethereal colour scheme felt like a given--yushe is all jade-coloured, the water would have that lovely green-blue hue, and there would be plants and pale rocks in the background. kang's warm human colours would create a nice contrast to the magical atmosphere of the spring, but he wouldn't look out of place because he'd be 'drawn into' the scene by the reflected green-ish light from the water. 

i set all the lineart and sketch layers to 'multiply,' made them dark green, and lowered the transparency a bit. as you can see i added some guidelines for the scales of yushe's tail, but i wasn't yet sure how 'prominent' i wanted the scaling pattern to be. it could be cool if his tail looked very 'carved out of stone,' with each scale carefully delineated as if sculpted by a skillful jadesmith. but on the other hand it could also look a bit messy and busy--and as you can see on the final painting i ended up going with a more smooth look. still, the sketchy guidelines were helpful when shading and highlighting his tail, giving it more threedimensionality.

i added the base colours as per usual, but lo and behold - i hardly used the 'lasso select + airbrush' method at all. i felt like the best way to colour yushe's tail--which is supposed to look like jade in colour, marbling, and sheen--was to use various textured brushes. again, he's supposed to look like a living statue, carved from a huge chunk of stone. jade occurs in many different shades, but yushe's 'main' hue is fairly pale and not super saturated. that said his body is not the same colour all over. note the darker streak of marbling across his torso, the pale areas on his tail and arm, and the shifting undertones of blue and green. 

i started colouring kang too, and changed the lineart outlining him from a dark green to a brown hue, because it looks better on top of human skin. i started painting the background and kept it very rough, focusing more on light and ambiance than detail, because i was going to add a blurry effect to it anyway. i also added a semi-transparent water layer on top of everything else, since much of yushe's tail is submerged in the pool. i hadn't finished colouring his tail yet, but i wanted to keep the water level in mind. i just hid the water layer as i kept working on his tail, adding a hint of scaling and creating a sense of depth by making sure that overlapping parts contrasted one another in hue and/or value. i also bathed kang in some reflected green light (pun intended), and made the background a bit more vibrant.

as you can see i flicked the water layer on and off to sort of 'check in' with what the image would end up looking like. by step 9 i had ditched the scaling guidelines because i felt like a soft look would better fit the soft vibe of the image in general. i kept adding more sheen to his scales because 1) jade is shiny and 2) his body is wet. i finished colouring kang, making sure that his colour scheme was simultaneously warm and green-ish enough to go well with the rest of the painting. even as i started cleaning the image up i tried to not put too much emphasis on the lineart; i went over some lines and made them a little darker, but at other places i added a pale line instead, or left the linework kind of subtle and sketchy altogether. 

last but not least i turned the water layer back on, added some details (a bit more sheen, water droplets, air particles) and adjusted the brightness/contrast and colour balance to make the picture more vibrant. honestly the first half of this process was a big struggle and i was super frustrated, but eventually something clicked and i managed to figure it all out. i love working with this type of colourscheme and i love the semi-painterly look of the final result!

art + yushe © me; kang © kubi.