Chapter 11 scenes and artwork

As promised, I'll share a bit about the process behind this last chapter's scenes and the artwork that illustrates it. 

In the images you can see the usual 4-setp process I follow when creating them: first, the line art is drawn and sent to the colorist, who sends back the second image. I give it a third pass adjusting colors and adding an additional layer of rendering, polishing textures, adding deeper shadows, rim lighting and other details to make the figures pop.  Finally, the background is placed and I paint the ambient lighting, trying to make the figures more readable and the colors more interesting, setting the overall mood of the scene and tying everything together. I also add any layered images needed such as tattoos, accessories or clothing.

In this chapter, some drawing have been partially outsourced to other artists. After trying a few, I found a couple of artists I wanted to try and work with. I chose my reference image, drew all the faces and hair of the characters and had the artist do the rest (mainly bodies and surfaces). This way we created some kind of Frankenstein monster of a drawing that, once colored, looked pretty close to my original drawings. If I didn't take care of the faces myself though, the drawing would've looked too out of place, since the way character faces are drawn is very distinctive to each artist.  

In the end, this meant that the workload I was outsorcing wasn't that great, since I still had to invest quite some time in the art, plus adjusting any mistakes done by the artists and micromanaging the commisions. Still, I'm looking for ways to delegate more on the art side, and I will still employ artists for minor scenes, like Lena's Stalkfap recording, in which I only drew her face and hair in each image. To me, the final quality of the images is not as high as I'd like, but it's close enough to feel like a good compromise. What do you think, did you notice any difference while playing? 

Let me know if you're interested in me sharing more of these WIP compilations, and if you're curious about any specific scene or part of the process you can ask down in the comments and I'll try to answer in the next post!