March MOTM: Lady of the Blood Moon painting process // nsfw

download the attached .zip below (contains 17 pngs and 1 gif) to access the process pack for march's monster of the month painting.

you know, i don't draw a lot of solo nsfw pictures. i've just always preferred drawing (and looking at) smut pictures containing two or more characters. but this month i decided to draw a solo masturbation image because 1) i think i'm suddenly starting to see the appeal of solo stuff? it used to be that they didn't really Do It for me, but lately i've started to appreciate solo nsfw images more. also 2) masturbation is great, and i kinda feel that there needs to be more art that normalises masturbation, both as something one does solely for one's own enjoyment and as a sexual activity that can be shared with others. and finally 3) simply for the sake of variety. after putting together the little collage of all 2018 MOTM paintings i could see that six of them depicted penetrative dick-in-hole action, two featured oral, two depicted 'hand-based' stuff (fingering and a handjob), and one depicted rubbing/foreplay. obviously i love all of those things but it also struck me that there's many other types of sexual activities that would be great for monster of the month art: masturbation, making out, heavy frotting, post-sex cuddling, rimming, pegging and other stuff involving toys... and so on. there's really so many diverse things i could draw and variety is always fun (both to draw and to look at).

so here's our lady of the blood moon having some quality me-time. the initial sketch is all about deciding on a pose and composition. i managed to more or less nail it from the start, i just changed the posing of her legs and would later resize and move the detail panel as well--but i was prepared for that, so everything in the detail panel is drawn on entirely separate layers from the main picture, making it easy to shrink and move. 

i originally meant for the lineart to be more rough and soft-looking but i was having one of those Good Days where linearting went super smoothly and felt like the easiest thing in the world... so i ended up using a tiny brush and making it all crisp and clean and precise instead. when i do linearts like this i often focus on the more important body parts first (especially if they're the trickiest to draw), so in this case i started with her head and hands. i zoom in a lot and have my left hand sitting on ctrl+z so i can immediately delete and redraw a line as needed. i also rotate the canvas a lot, which makes it so much easier to draw smooth lines.

as for the basic flat colours i had already decided on most of the colour scheme. the character herself is all red and gold, but her fur is a more muted/desaturated tan hue compared to a real jaguar, because i thought that red + gold + jaguar orange might be Too Many Bright Colours At Once.  i already mentioned (in the design commentary) that orthodox icons were at the back of my mind for this design and so i wanted to paint a background that mimicked the gold leaf foil you can see on many icons. i wasn't sure of the colours of the pillows at first, but eventually settled on a soft green that i thought complemented the other colours really well.

next i started adding gradients, using the lasso select + airbrush method. the first gradients are big and 'sweeping' and softly fade into the base colours (steps 06 and 07), but then i started selecting more specific areas and adding smaller gradients with sharper edges, not least when adding some shadows to her clothes (steps 08 and 09). i had already added gradients to the gold parts of her outfit too, and next i started painting on some details, making them look more metallic and shiny.

at this point i was actually loving the 'flat' look of this picture, so i decided i didn't want to overdo it with too heavy shading, highlighting, detail, or texture. it was another one of those 'less is more' occasions--part of me almost wanted to leave the image as it was on step 10, something about how clean and smooth it looked is just super appealing to me. but i wasn't done yet. 

i kept working on her jewellery and clothes, detailed her face, started painting her pussy (i've really been loving painting pussies lately), and added some minimal shading and detail to the background. i added her jaguar spots, some slick to her fingers, and the red moon 'halo' behind her head. it was starting to look very finished, but i wanted to try adding some deeper shadows and i'm happy i did, because they gave the image that extra oomph (steps 15 and 16). 

finally, i increased the brightness and adjusted the contrast and levels a bit. ... and also i last-minute changed the expression on her face, because it struck me that her original expression looked like she was kind of just ... bored and zoning out, lol.

and that's it! much as predicted this was incredibly fun to colour because i don't often work with this type of warm colourscheme that's so heavy on the reds. hope you enjoyed, and comment below if you have any further questions.

// art + character © me.