PROCESS: sinning of the third degree // nsfw

so as you may know, the other week i designed a character named maros. tbh i haven't even figured out his lore and backstory yet, but i'm really in love with his design and i wanted to draw some smut with him. he doesn't have a designated partner (yet), but lucky for me kubi has a character named levi who's always down to get fucked by a monster--and maros is always down for leading a wayward priest even further astray, so everyone wins!

first things first: let's talk about pose ideas. i feel like i draw a lot of people getting fucked from behind--it's a personal favourite and, if portrayed from the right angles, gives you a good nice view of where the action's at. of course there's a bunch of different "from behind" poses, and a number of ways to add variation to depictions of the same pose (viewing angle, position of arms and head, spine curvature, expressions, body language, etc etc), and i guess there's no need to fix what ain't broke... but at the same time, variety is always nice, and lately i've just been a bit wary of the poses i draw. i don't ever want to feel like i'm stuck drawing the same poses over and over, so i want to draw a wider variety of sex positions, simply because it's fun. and i think it's paying off, cause when i showed the sketch to kubi she said "that's also a v Nice position. get in deep." 

it can be difficult to think of different poses on the fly, though. if you're just opening up a blank canvas with the intention to nail the perfect pose at once, eager to get to the linearting and colouring stages, it's easy to feel overwhelmed or stressed out, or like you have no new pose ideas whatsoever. you might find yourself resorting to the same default poses you're already familiar with, or you might end up not drawing anything at all.

personally, i keep a few PSDs with just scribbles of pose ideas. sometimes i just doodle stick figures without really thinking too hard about it, sometimes i get inspired by poses i see in porn or in movies, and sometimes i just get random out-of-the-blue revelations of great sex poses. if you can't make a doodle of a pose idea at once, make a note in a text doc on your phone, or the like. and then, whenever i want to draw or paint some smut, i can go to my pose PDFs for pose ideas. it's a good way to sort of take the pressure off of yourself, you don't always have to come up with a pose on the spot, you have a sort of personal library of pose doodles to base your drawings on.

ANYWAY, what i'm trying to say is that for this painting, i wanted to draw a pose i haven't quite drawn before, and i'm very pleased with what i ended up with. i'm not saying it's revolutionary in any way, but it's a bit new for me, and that's what matters. 

the linearting and colouring methods i used for this painting is kind of the same as always, but there's one thing i wanted to discuss: colouring white/pale stuff, such as fur, scales, bones, fabrics, etc. lots of people find it pretty difficult to paint with white and other pale colours (it's easy to over-do the whiteness and make it look too bright, or to make the shadows too deep, or make it look flat relative to the rest of the picture, and so on) so here's a few comments on it:

i usually go about it by starting with a medium-dark hue, and then i use successively paler hues from there on. in other words, i usually colour pale hues from dark to light. i never use #ffffff, aka the whitest white ever, not even for the brightest highlights; and i never shade white/pale colours with "pure" grey, unless it's a grey-scale picture, since that may turn out looking lifeless and desaturated. instead, depending on the pale/white colour in question, i use hues with a slightly coloured undertone, whether it's muted and grey-ish or more vibrant. once you add the lightest hues and the highlights, the colour will still read as white/pale, but in a more life-like and interesting way.

in the case of this drawing, i coloured in the flats for maros using the same colours as on the sketches i did recently, but then i made them all a bit darker. i did add some more shadows (both gradients and some "cross-hatching"), but also worked a lot with adding successively lighter and lighter hues to his fur. however, at stage 12, i realised i had made the colours a bit too dark, they looked a bit too different from his colour scheme as seen on the design sketches, so i brightened them back up a little. the tricky part about colouring pale stuff is getting it too look neither too pale nor too dark, and to avoid too stark a contrast between the lightest parts and the darkest shadows. i'm not sure if i'm 100% satisfied with the result here, i feel like i might need to experiment a bit before i'm able to get maros' colour scheme to look exactly like i want it to--but i'm extremely happy with the picture overall, so yolo whatevs! 

// art + maros © me; levi © kubi.