Process Notes

Not sure how useful this is likely to be, but I do actually enjoy talking shop so to speak, so here's a little breakdown for a simple pinup drawing. Posting the original might not go down well on here, but I'm using a shot of Samantha Saint as reference.

Keeping the sketch as loose as possible to start out with, just looking for interesting shapes. I want to have a more cartoony style to this one, so I like to think of it more like sticking balls of clay together and moulding them into an appealling form than going for absolute anatomical accuracy. The head is based on Doxy's construction approach; I'm just roughing out the overall shape, then drawing a circular plane where the face will come in and adding the eyesockets into that. Strong recommend for Doxy's tutorials in general actually, even if you're not a fan of his style, they're very informative.

I got the face in pretty quickly here. The model has really great lips, so I wanted to make sure to include them, but if you're going for a very anime look, you could just as easily leave them out. Thinking about the hands at this stage, I usually find it easier to try and block in the entire shape, then divide it up to get the fingers. If you're having trouble, try to group the fingers together where you can.

Inking! Typically, I do clean lines with the pencil tool in Clip Studio, but I got this pen from an artist called Flou and I like the thick/thin variance on it. It's on their patreon page if you're interested in trying it.

I'm just going to do flats with a few accents for the colors here, I'll do a breakdown for the sort of color I usually do another time. Also felt like I needed a little flourish in the background, so I've put the inevitable colorful square off to the side of her just to help pull the eye towards that side.

Post-processing is again pretty simple here; I've increased the saturation, used a little chromatic abberation and added a noise filter for a hint of texture. I feel like I overcook everything I do in the post-processing stage, so I'm trying to cut down.

So yeah, hopefully that was helpful? If anyone ever wants to ask me art-related questions, please do - can't promise I'll know the answers, but I'm happy to try and help.