PROCESS: winter ladies // nsfw

here's the process pack for this recent painting of my winter monster + huntress pairing: download the .zip below, it contains 19 pngs and 1 gif! fun fact: the final painting was cropped, but in this process pack you get to see the full original framing of it--it was really mostly the winter monster's tail that got cropped out, but still!

i almost hesitate to call this a "painting," because i didn't really use any traditional painting methods much. rather, i used the lasso select + gradient tool/airbrush method i've described previously. it basically consists of laying a foundation of base colours, locking the layer transparency, selecting successively smaller and smaller areas with the lasso tool, and using an airbrush (or the gradient tool) on those selections in order to add shadows, texture, highlights, and details. the selections can be coloured in a more or less crisp or subtle way, depending on if you fill the whole selection with colour or if you use the airbrush to add a partial gradient that smoothy fades into the colours below. experiment with different airbrush sizes!

as usual, it starts with a pose idea, rough sketch, and lineart. for the lineart, lately i've been very into the look of thin, fine lines. i keep them a bit sketchy and if necessary i polish the lines up a bit later on, but i like how they make the picture look so neat and clean? as soon as the lineart was done i lowered the transparency of it, and towards the later stage of the process i went over some of the more important lines again, filling them in. these are primarily the lines of the parts that are "in focus;" emphasizing their outlines is a good way to make them pop a bit, especially where they overlap with other parts of the characters' bodies.

i used my first painting of these two as reference for their colours--as in, i literally just used the colour picker tool to pick each colour from it. this means that the colours are very consistent from painting to painting, buuut in hindsight i also wish that i had added some variation to this the same theme; i think the colour scheme is gorgeous, but if you squint at the two paintings you would barely be able to tell them apart, since the colours are so similar. i could have made the temperature of the image cooler or warmer, or added an interesting type of light, for example. of course the characters would still maintain the same colour scheme, by and large, but that doesn't mean you have to use the exact same hex codes in every single painting. the same colour can look very different in different lighting and temperatures!

i normally keep different colours on separate layers, but in this case i started out with merely three initial layers; one for the huntress' skin, one for her hair, and one single layer for the snow monster. the reason for this is that her colours shift a lot across her body, for example her arm goes from dark brown to blue to ochre to blue again. i felt like the best way to make all these gradual shifts blend into one another in a smooth, organic way was to keep all the colours on the same layer. 

the way i render the snow monster's icy parts is a good example of the lasso select + airbrush technique, and also a neat example of how i colour something that isn't skin, fur, hair, or scales. as you can see, the base colour is a very pale blue (which fades into the dark brown hue of her wrist and hand). i picked a medium-dark blue hue first, selected the icy "flakes" that are closest to her elbow (leaving the edge, where the base colour would still be visible), and used a fairly big airbrush to add a gradient from the top, meaning the gradient colour is most prominent at the top while fading into the base colours at the bottom. i repeated this with the next "row" of arm scales, and then moved on to the rest of the icy parts, until the first layer of blues was done. next i picked a somewhat darker blue, and went over the scales again, selecting a somewhat smaller area but applying a gradient the same way. lastly, i used an even darker blue to add just a small gradient along the upper edge of each ice flake selection. these layers of blue creates an icy look; as a final touch i went over the edges with an extremely pale blue hue (almost white) and added a few small highlights to make it look a bit more shiny.

her fur i coloured in much the same way as usual; the lasso tool allows me to make selections of any shape i want, so i use it to create texture too, by sometimes giving the outlines of the selection the shape of tufts of fur. when rendering the huntress' skin i used a combination of dark and light gradients to create form, giving shape to her musculature and curves. her hair is a good example of how i've been putting an effort into learning new ways to colour hair--i used to add more detail and texture when drawing hair, but now i'm experimenting with focusing more on form and colour, if that makes sense. 

i also added a layer of shadows using what is a somewhat new method for me, inspired by cel-shading. i created a new layer, set it to multiply, and used the lasso tool to select the areas where i wanted to add shadows. i filled them in with a medium dark purple hue, and adjusted the transparency until i liked the way it looked. i also used an airbrush eraser to soften up the edges of some shadows. i added highlights on a separate layer set to overlay, using the lasso select tool and filling the selections in with a very pale yellow, adjusting the transparency afterwards.

let me know if you have any questions! <3

// art + characters © me.