February MOTM: Smoke/shadow monster painting process // nsfw

the process pack for february's monster of the month painting; download the attached .zip below.

as i drew the concept art i ended up using an inky-looking brush to achieve the smoky, brush pen-esque effect. to be honest i didn't really plan it - i was on the phone and started leisurely inking the sketch to keep my hands occupied while talking, and i really like the way it turned out. i decided to do something similar for the painting, drawing sau (as i named the shadow monster) in much the same way, kind of focusing on inking him rather than painting him, if that makes sense. in order to enhance the sense of form/depth i coloured parts of the lineart and added some lighter (overlay) gradients, but there's just a minimum amount of colour added below the ink/lineart layer, since the inking itself gets most of the job done.

i wanted the colours to go well together but when a colour-scheme is too matchy-matchy it runs the risk of making an image more difficult to read, with various elements blending together rather than being easily distinguishable from one another. that's why i changed the colours of both the background and the characters a bunch. i settled on a muted blue-grey background, made the ladymonster pale green rather than blue, and gave the shadow monster a darker green undertone. this made it much easier for the eye to tell character from background than when both the background and the characters were blue-ish. one trick to telling if your colour choices are good is to squint at the picture. if you squint at WIP #9 it kind of just blends together into a blue-black blurry mass, but if you squint at WIP #15 it's much easier to tell where the characters end and the background begins. 

on a final note i find myself realising that it would have made more sense, design-wise, to have the smoke monster's tongue and dick be a less vibrant colour than bright blue... but hey, it looks neat, and it makes those elements stand out and demand attention, which is what i wanted.

hope you enjoyed this process pack and as always, leave any questions below. <3

// art + characters © me.