PROCESS PACK: Nighttime visitor // nsfw

here's the process pack for my recent drawing of vaska and amato; access it by downloading the .zip below, it contains 15 pngs and 1 gif. 

vaska and amato is a couple of contrast, where vaska is dark, grey, shadowy, and creepy-looking while amato is pale, fair, soft, elfy, and unnervingly beautiful. i wanted this picture to reflect that aesthetic and i had a mental image of them in a dark room with the moonlight shining in through a window, creating a stark contrast between shadow and light. even at the stage of the early sketch i vaguely blocked in the shadow--though in the end the lighting turned out softer and and more "foggy" than originally planned.

i kept the lineart rather rough and sketchy but relatively detailed, set the lineart layer to 'multiply,' and lowered the transparency before adding the base flat colours. at first i planned to crop the picture a bit, hence the semi-transparent 'frame' visible in step 03. on a new layer i sketched out roughly what i wanted the lighting/shadow to look like, just to get an idea, but i kept that layer hidden while i coloured the characters.

as so often before i began with the biggest gradients, blocking in the characters' basic colouration, and then gradually moved on to smaller and smaller gradients, adding detail and texture. vaska's fur is quite rough and pointy, while amato is all soft and smooth, and i tried emphasising that contrast in the way i coloured and shaded both of them. i used mostly the lasso select + airbrush method, but also a textured round brush for adding details and cleaning up the whole thing. 

the picture drastically changes from step 08 to 09, as i added a simple but striking background behind the characters. i also added a shadow layer on top of them, which was set to 'multiply,' effectively making most of vaska much darker. the tricky thing about drawing dark characters and/or deep shadows is you still want the image to be easy to read without straining the eye or making it too difficult to make out form and details. it was a balance act to find the 'perfect level' of shadowy darkness by adjusting the transparency of the shadow layer.

i kept refining the background a bit, playing around with texture and shadows, and also added a blue tint around vaska's outline, making it easier to tell him apart from the backdrop. to that same effect i also changed the colour temperature of the characters, giving vaska a sliiightly more yellow undertone while making amato's colours more cold and pale. i added some more shadows and light to vaska, and instead of going with my first idea of a stylised 'halo' around amato's head i added equally stylised little flowers. 

finally, i played around with some photoshop magic, adjusting the colour balance in a way that changed the picture quite drastically. in effect i made the characters and the soft cloth around amato's head more sepia-toned, while keeping the background and the corners quite blue. it's reminiscent of yellowed old photos, which somehow fits this couple quite nicely, and again helps delineating the characters from the background.

my focus with this picture was atmosphere and experimenting with light and shadow. vaska is a vampire (specifically a strigoi) and amato is fae. vaska belongs in the darkness, and i personally associate elves with soft pale light, like that of moonlit fog. amato's half of the picture is bright and smooth, with him sort of surrounded by that cold sheen, while vaska creeps out of the shadows to love on him--which basically is what their story is all about. they're both eerie and unnerving in different but equally folklory ways, and i do feel like this picture illustrates that creepy but beautiful vibe quite well!

as always, feel free to comment below if you have any questions about this process. <3

// art + vaska © me; amato © kubi.