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How is artings formed? How artist get pics?
So I told people I was thinking about posting about 'how I make fanart' (and honestly I think about doing that with every art piece I work on because you guys PROCESS PROCESS IS SO INTERESTING) and the Jolllly-with-dragonfly-wings piece I just did is a good demo of the techniques I fall back on when I'm not trying anything new. So here it is.
Warnings: lots of images. Also, please please don't take this as 'art advice' or, goodness forbid, a tutorial - there's some tricks in here I'm proud of but also a lot of stuff that I know for a fact I could do better if I took the time to learn to do it right.
This is meant mostly just to demystify the process of art a little. I see so many people talking about fanart like it's magic, and, okay, the people who do the really good stuff? Still magic. But you can pull off okay stuff with really simple tools and some practice, if you put in the practice, and also if you're willing to cheat judiciously.
Materials used for making this image: paper, pencil, Google Images, Wacom Bamboo tablet I picked up at a rummage sale a few years ago, scanner/camera, GIMP image manipulation program
I pretty much exclusively use GIMP for digital art, because it's free, and it's open source, so I know it (or a version like it) will always be free, and will work on whatever system I end up using. Also I've been using it for over ten years so I'm used to it. I've tried actual digital painting programs a few times (there are even some not-bad freeware ones), and I'm sure if I practiced a lot I could get much better results there, but then again, if I put more effort into learning the capabilities of GIMP, I could get much better results from GIMP, too - another thing about open source is that its capabilities are pretty much limited only by how much time you want to spend attempting to figure out how to get them.
Also, up until recently the computer I was using for this was so old that anything too fancy would slow it down too much - I'm still adjusting to not having to keep an eye on RAM usage when I do this - which has shaped my methods a lot.
So, step one: paper & pencil sketch. Done away from computer, because if I do it on the computer I spend all my time looking for a PERFECT REFERENCE IMAGE on Google instead of thinking about what I can actually draw and how to make it look pretty. You will notice a couple of other less-fleshed-out ideas for composition there - when I first thought about this, it was going to be Joly standing up and Bossuet in front of him holding a candle, but I pretty quickly realized that was unworkable, at least for me. You'll also notice a couple of sketches-from-life of people in poses somewhat similar to the final ones, and you'll notice that the life sketches suck much less than the sketch of the fanart image. (This is why you should always life-sketch if you can - I drew these at a concert in the park, which is a great place for poeple sitting on the ground and not moving much.)
Once I really thought about it, final composition was pretty easily determined by: I wanted to show his eyes, his wings, and the chitin down his backbone; and I wanted to have to draw as little other stuff as possible. So seated with his back to us and turning his head to look over his shoulder was it. The oval frame with the wings extending outside the frame, while it ended up REALLY COOL, was originally just so I wouldn't have to draw more background just to fill in around the wings - within the close frame I could get away with blank wall + poorly sketched in sheets, but with a larger frame I would have needed a lot more effort.
Also from the beginning I wanted it to have a sort of claustrophic feeling? I even briefly considered having the wings be crumpled against the walls/edges of the picture, but then realized there was no way I could draw new, damp, crumpled wings. So this composition encloses the human character closely but doesn't confine the insect parts, plus it let me play with transparency which is always fun.
The twisted back (as opposed to him just turning his head) is partly because it gives at least a little motion/dynamism to the image, and it also meant that I didn't have to worry as much about symmetry with the chitin plates. But it's also a pose that comics readers are used to seeing as a sexualized/female pose, which was also intentional in terms of the alien vulnerability/danger/allure I wanted you to see in this Jolllly. Because if anyone is a creepy insectile alien, it's the comic women who are often drawn in those poses.
Next, scan it in the sketch and do a basic underdrawing over it with the tablet. The ideal is that I'd be working in a transparent layer over the scanned sketch, but as usual, I forgot and ended up drawing it directly on the sketch. Oh well, terrible sketch, no loss.
I usually start with a basic skeletal outline, which I've overdrawn in red here, because on the original I (again) forgot to do a new layer and mostly drew over it. I learned this method out of some how-to-draw manga book when I was like 14? Probably not the best way! But I'd already read a bunch of how-to-draw books that either had you draw only lines, which didn't really help me any, or had you draw complicated 3D cylinders and things, which was WAY too much work when the final result was usually just going to be a cartoon. This method - where you basically are drawing the skeleton, skull-spine-ribcage-pelvis and then lines for the limbs and circles for the joints - gives me a good sense of the three-dimensionality of the body and where the bending and twisting happens without having to do all the polygons. (If I'm doing anything where hands are important, I draw lines for the hand bones, too - five lines coming directly from the wrist joint - but for this picture I could get away with mitten-hands.)
And then you can see the purple is a basic attempt at outlining what the final sketch will look like; I'm mostly just testing to see if what I see in my head is actually going to work on the computer. You can see that I'm altering the sketch a lot already - fixing the head/neck proportions mostly, and I've moved his legs around. I think the way it was in the sketch may actually have worked better compositionally but I played around with this pose and a mirror for awhile, and also did do some searching for references on Google, because while I wanted to call back to the twisted pose I also knew this wanted to be mostly realistic-ish, and this one made more sense in terms of what he might actually be doing (which is supposed to be unwrapping bandages, though I think that didn't come through all that clearly.)
Next step (and now we actually are working in transparent layers, yay, so I can fade out the sketch layer I was still working over): I google-image-searched for anatomy of back muscles, and here you can see I've sketched a muscles layer over the very rough version. I don't always bother with this step, but this drawing needed it, because I was working with unfamiliar anatomy. The insect-y bits are in green, but you can see they're actually pretty closely based on human anatomy, just... green and shiny. I'm working in different colors of ink here because it helps me track what's on each layer, and also because some of the layering effects in GIMP that let me compare layers work much better with colors than with blacks and grays.
You'll notice his head is still not drawn in. That's because next step:
I call this step YOU KNEW YOU CAN'T DRAW FACES IN MORE THAN 1/4 PROFILE, WHY DID YOU DESIGN IT THAT WAY. So I went and got a reference off my 'useful art references from tumblr' list (aka: my 'favorites'). And then didn't... quite... trace it.
The yellow layer is the hair and bandages and draperies and so on - this is stuff that I can change easily late in the process without having to fundamentally change the drawing, so it's pretty rough, and mostly just there so I know where it is and can figure out how it works with the finished composition. That's also why it's on a separate layer. Notice that he still has the stubble that I completely forgot about at some point before final inks (I probably should have used something easier to see than yellow here.) Also now that we pretty much know how much space he's taking up, we've got the oval for the frame, drawn with GIMP's oval tool, natch.
Here we've got preliminary inks, mostly to make sure I actually remember how to use the inking tool, and also to digest the underdrawing into basic simple lines.
I'm simplifying the lines a lot because by this point, I'd pretty much decided I was going to go for something stain glass/art nouveau-ish, with jewelly-colors and simple, curvy linework, because: dragonflies! And also I've wanted to do that kind of thing for ages! And also, here is a tip: if you're not confident in your art, copy other peoples' styles. Not "your favorite artist" or "that manga you like", but all kinds of different styles - and learn to think about a style that will work for a given image. Copying other styles makes you actually think about how they're put together, and also, a 'style' is 'a really good artist's set of shortcuts and things they can get away with to make the art go faster'; you probably don't know enough yet to come up with a set of your own that actually work, so steal other artists' for now, and you can still get away with stuff.
And the hair and draperies also in preliminary inks, drawn on a separate layer so I can change them easily without having to re-do the rest of the drawing. I'm using lighter line-weights here mostly because I haven't yet figured out what I'm doing with line weights and I'm testing what I can do with the pen.
This is basically just a color test - what are my final colors going to be? Are they going to work together? How are the lights and darks going to work out? Is this something that's even going to work in color? What can I ignore in the line drawing/etc. because the colors will be dark enough it's not really visible? You can see that I changed things a lot after this, but also that I had the basic red + cyan + green palette already basically figured. (Red and cyan for hemoglobin and hemocynanin and also because tricolor, green because it's specified in the fic, but they make a nice set of jewel tones together. Insect blood really tends more toward the green, tbh, but I wanted to keep the tricolor symbolism, and beside he's an alienbugperson, not a real dragonfly. :P)
You can also see that I put some of the final colors from the wings on the wrong layer here. OOPS.
Here is the point at which I realize that I will never be able to draw properly-shaped, consistent dragonfly wings without tracing, so I get another reference image (this one happens to be from the 'insect wings' entry on wikipedia. What can I say? It made a good reference image.) We can also drop out all the underdrawing now; we're going just on the preliminary inks layer.
And here you see my first wing drawing since the early sketches. You can see I didn't just trace the reference image - I've chopped it up to angle the wings better for the curve of his back, and I've also stretched the image so that one set of wings is slightly longer than the other, giving it something sort of like actual perspective, so the wings on the side he's turning toward us are angled a bit toward the viewer.
Note that other than basic shape, I'm not directly tracing the referenc image - I didn't want an exact copy of any particular dragonfly, and I also decided that freehanding it would be a lot less boring than tracing. This is the point at which I a) desconstruct the vein patterns in dragonfly wings via a lot of staring at internet pictures; b) realize the wings are going to look AMAZING; c) realize the wings are going to be a pain in the ass; d) realize I'm going to have to re-draw the whole thing with more care to my inking, so I stop there because I am totally not going to re-draw the whole thing *twice*.
Okay, we basically know what's up with the wings, so they go away again. Now we've got the final inks layer, and you can see here why I used colors for my other underlayers. You can also see how the final inks layer is altering the preliminary inks in a couple of ways; changing proportions a bit again, messing with the fall of the drapes, etc.
And here's the final inks with the underlayers turned off (as they're going to stay turned off). You can see a bit better in this one that I've also added color to the inks, really dark versions of the eventual flat colors for each form - that didn't happen until a couple of steps later, when I had some coloring done, but it's a kind of neat effect for this kind of line-heavy art, and it's an effect that sometimes works best if it's not really noticeable.
I'm paying a lot more attention to line weight here than in any of the previous layers, with heavy lines around forms and thinner ones for details within forms, but I'm also not paying nearly as much attention as I *should* - the line weights ought to either be staying perfectly consistent within each category, or else making smooth curves that emphasize the three-dimensionality. Unfortunately I am still on the 'please don't suddenly go all wobbly oh goddamit' level, so I called that good enough. (You can also see how little effort I put into the draperies on the bed. It's going to be dark in the final colors - who cares!)
Okay, draw the damn wings. These are done with three different brush sizes, and a pen setting that minimizes variation in line weight, which is what I probably should have done for the main inks too, but oh well. The outlines and heavy veins are actually on a different layer than the really fine veins this time, which made it easier to correct mistakes and to mess with stuff later.
That inner veins layer took me more than four episodes of Night Vale just by itself.
On the plus side, I can now doodle dragonfly wings whenever I get bored of doodling Celtic Knotwork, so it was a good investment of time...
Final colors test; now that I have final inks I can do colors with the capture + fill tools instead of scribbling. You can see I've settled on the basic palette, #024601 green (because if canon gives you a gift like that, use it) and then a rusty-red and a dark cyan built off of that. There's also a dull gold that shows up in the skin and in a lot of the shading, and eventually in the frame. All the colors in the finished work are based on that set of four jeweltone colors. (Joly's a pale-ish redhead not because I have any particular attachment to that headcanon but because it worked with the colors and the lighting really well, and also red hair is among the easiest to shade if you suck at shading hair.) You can see I actually did some shading on this layer, too, mostly to see if it would make the chitin plates look less terrible.
Final color flats - I'm working over this set of final inks+flat colors for all of the rest of it, basically. You can see I accidentally did the shading for the back wall on this layer instead of one of the shading layers. OOPS. You can also see a bit where I mixed a couple of my palette colors with the smudge tool to find colors to shade with. (probably a terrible habit for computer coloring, but some things you pick up in art class in third grade and never quite drop.)
Here we have my shading references - green glass (as was specified in the fic for the chitin) and bossuet holding a candle as my light source. Bossuet was originally sketched in the actual position the light was going to come from, but at that point I had Jolllly facing right, and I realized that a) I wanted Jolllly turning toward Bossuet and the candle, and b) I can only shade from a point lighting source if the light is coming from the upper left, otherwise I confuse myself. Sad but true. So everything got flipped left/right at this point. (I'd flipped left/right several times earlier just to see if everything was still looking okay.)
Here's the base shading layer; the chitin actually came out MUCH better than I was expecting it to, and if you look closely you can sort of even see Bossuet holding the candle! The hair and the skin came out less well, but luckily he was *supposed* to look like he'd been on the verge of death for days, so lank, dead-looking hair and zombie-esque skin tones were all right.
For shading, I was trying to use bright oranges/yellows for the highlights and blues/purples for the shadows, and it did work well for the chitin and reasonably well for the hair and bandages, but not very well on the skin. At that point I probably should have tried something different instead of just slathering on more paint in the same so-dark-they-barely-have-any-hue-left colors - maybe even looked up a skin shading tutorial online - but I was not thinking that clearly by then.
I also did a *lot* of messing with contrast/lightness/saturation/hue here, because I am *never* as brave as I should be with shading, so this is actually much, much more intense shading than I started with.
I'm still really not happy with how the shading came out on most of his skin (okay, the lighter arm is pretty good, although it could probably still do with more gold tones and darke shadows, because candlelight) but I *cannot* get the nice, smooth shading across long gradients that you really need to make skin look right in this style of coloring. I suspect the answer is a) work on a bigger canvas (but I get nervous and way too fiddly about details when I do that. Also, RAM issues), b) use brushes other than the default gimp paintbrushes (ugh, brushes), and c) put in more time on it (...someday). In the meantime this was good enough.
So this layer was meant to just be the bruising etc. around where the wings emerged and the blood on the bandages and a few final details. I probably should have gone more out with the bruising and ichor and general body grossness, but tbh I was in this for pretty bugs, not for body horror, so I wimped out. Also I've never drawn anything like that before and was pretty sure it wouldn't work very well with this style. Also, by this point I was just ready to be DONE with the frickin' drawing so I was going for fast and lazy.
You can see I also decided that the shaded half of his body needed to be darker. You can also see how much more obvious my lack of ability to shade skin nicely is apparent when the contrast is upped. I think the shading looked better in the lighter version, but the darkening makes the image as a whole look better? I probably should have worked a lot more on this until it was something I was actually satisfied with, but I was seriously done with being unable to think about anything else. Luckily, the wings are going to hide a lot of this.
...also I actually kind of like the way the bandages turned out even though I had no idea what I was doing with them; I guess all the togas I used to draw paid off? They really do look like something from a stained-glass window, and the tricolor-of-blood-and-ichor idea actually sort of worked.
The wings are actually four different layers at this point - outlines/thick veins, inner veins, tricolor flags, and transparent background. That way I could set the transparencies differently for all of them and mess with the colors/etc. And I ended up doing a lot of that as I tried to find a wing color that worked well with the colors I ended up with in finish shading, as you'll see in the final image they ended up a much more green-toned color.
(You also see here how I had a dark-green background layer I was occasionally swapping out for the white, to see how it would look against different backgrounds, especially in the transparent version.)
And the last step, the detailing in the frame. I'd sort of been thinking about this in the background since I started working on it, but it was still really improvised and last minute. (And if you look closely you'll note that the crosshair that I used to line up the radial lines was still visible in the image I originally posted to tumblr. OOPS.) I ended up using a really sloppy set of gradients + manual highlights and it actually came out much better than it had any right to, hooray!
...and the final image!
This is exactly half the size of the working image (the images above are at 1/3 size); I probably should have been working a lot bigger but smaller is less intimidating and less likely to crash my computer.
Anyway, yes! That is how I make art, hoorah. I hope this has at least done something to reveal to you that sometimes sheer bloody-mindedness and Google Images can make up for what one doesn't got in terms of talent, skill, and discipline.
(also if anyone would like to critique you're welcome to, bearing in mind that I am quite well aware of all the things that are wrong with this image.)
Just for fun, here's a not-dissimilar image I drew about ten years ago, so we can all be depressed by how little I've improved in a decade:
...not much, then
Also here's an animation of just the color layers. I think I actually like just-the-shading-layer best...
Warnings: lots of images. Also, please please don't take this as 'art advice' or, goodness forbid, a tutorial - there's some tricks in here I'm proud of but also a lot of stuff that I know for a fact I could do better if I took the time to learn to do it right.
This is meant mostly just to demystify the process of art a little. I see so many people talking about fanart like it's magic, and, okay, the people who do the really good stuff? Still magic. But you can pull off okay stuff with really simple tools and some practice, if you put in the practice, and also if you're willing to cheat judiciously.
Materials used for making this image: paper, pencil, Google Images, Wacom Bamboo tablet I picked up at a rummage sale a few years ago, scanner/camera, GIMP image manipulation program
I pretty much exclusively use GIMP for digital art, because it's free, and it's open source, so I know it (or a version like it) will always be free, and will work on whatever system I end up using. Also I've been using it for over ten years so I'm used to it. I've tried actual digital painting programs a few times (there are even some not-bad freeware ones), and I'm sure if I practiced a lot I could get much better results there, but then again, if I put more effort into learning the capabilities of GIMP, I could get much better results from GIMP, too - another thing about open source is that its capabilities are pretty much limited only by how much time you want to spend attempting to figure out how to get them.
Also, up until recently the computer I was using for this was so old that anything too fancy would slow it down too much - I'm still adjusting to not having to keep an eye on RAM usage when I do this - which has shaped my methods a lot.
So, step one: paper & pencil sketch. Done away from computer, because if I do it on the computer I spend all my time looking for a PERFECT REFERENCE IMAGE on Google instead of thinking about what I can actually draw and how to make it look pretty. You will notice a couple of other less-fleshed-out ideas for composition there - when I first thought about this, it was going to be Joly standing up and Bossuet in front of him holding a candle, but I pretty quickly realized that was unworkable, at least for me. You'll also notice a couple of sketches-from-life of people in poses somewhat similar to the final ones, and you'll notice that the life sketches suck much less than the sketch of the fanart image. (This is why you should always life-sketch if you can - I drew these at a concert in the park, which is a great place for poeple sitting on the ground and not moving much.)
Once I really thought about it, final composition was pretty easily determined by: I wanted to show his eyes, his wings, and the chitin down his backbone; and I wanted to have to draw as little other stuff as possible. So seated with his back to us and turning his head to look over his shoulder was it. The oval frame with the wings extending outside the frame, while it ended up REALLY COOL, was originally just so I wouldn't have to draw more background just to fill in around the wings - within the close frame I could get away with blank wall + poorly sketched in sheets, but with a larger frame I would have needed a lot more effort.
Also from the beginning I wanted it to have a sort of claustrophic feeling? I even briefly considered having the wings be crumpled against the walls/edges of the picture, but then realized there was no way I could draw new, damp, crumpled wings. So this composition encloses the human character closely but doesn't confine the insect parts, plus it let me play with transparency which is always fun.
The twisted back (as opposed to him just turning his head) is partly because it gives at least a little motion/dynamism to the image, and it also meant that I didn't have to worry as much about symmetry with the chitin plates. But it's also a pose that comics readers are used to seeing as a sexualized/female pose, which was also intentional in terms of the alien vulnerability/danger/allure I wanted you to see in this Jolllly. Because if anyone is a creepy insectile alien, it's the comic women who are often drawn in those poses.
Next, scan it in the sketch and do a basic underdrawing over it with the tablet. The ideal is that I'd be working in a transparent layer over the scanned sketch, but as usual, I forgot and ended up drawing it directly on the sketch. Oh well, terrible sketch, no loss.
I usually start with a basic skeletal outline, which I've overdrawn in red here, because on the original I (again) forgot to do a new layer and mostly drew over it. I learned this method out of some how-to-draw manga book when I was like 14? Probably not the best way! But I'd already read a bunch of how-to-draw books that either had you draw only lines, which didn't really help me any, or had you draw complicated 3D cylinders and things, which was WAY too much work when the final result was usually just going to be a cartoon. This method - where you basically are drawing the skeleton, skull-spine-ribcage-pelvis and then lines for the limbs and circles for the joints - gives me a good sense of the three-dimensionality of the body and where the bending and twisting happens without having to do all the polygons. (If I'm doing anything where hands are important, I draw lines for the hand bones, too - five lines coming directly from the wrist joint - but for this picture I could get away with mitten-hands.)
And then you can see the purple is a basic attempt at outlining what the final sketch will look like; I'm mostly just testing to see if what I see in my head is actually going to work on the computer. You can see that I'm altering the sketch a lot already - fixing the head/neck proportions mostly, and I've moved his legs around. I think the way it was in the sketch may actually have worked better compositionally but I played around with this pose and a mirror for awhile, and also did do some searching for references on Google, because while I wanted to call back to the twisted pose I also knew this wanted to be mostly realistic-ish, and this one made more sense in terms of what he might actually be doing (which is supposed to be unwrapping bandages, though I think that didn't come through all that clearly.)
Next step (and now we actually are working in transparent layers, yay, so I can fade out the sketch layer I was still working over): I google-image-searched for anatomy of back muscles, and here you can see I've sketched a muscles layer over the very rough version. I don't always bother with this step, but this drawing needed it, because I was working with unfamiliar anatomy. The insect-y bits are in green, but you can see they're actually pretty closely based on human anatomy, just... green and shiny. I'm working in different colors of ink here because it helps me track what's on each layer, and also because some of the layering effects in GIMP that let me compare layers work much better with colors than with blacks and grays.
You'll notice his head is still not drawn in. That's because next step:
I call this step YOU KNEW YOU CAN'T DRAW FACES IN MORE THAN 1/4 PROFILE, WHY DID YOU DESIGN IT THAT WAY. So I went and got a reference off my 'useful art references from tumblr' list (aka: my 'favorites'). And then didn't... quite... trace it.
The yellow layer is the hair and bandages and draperies and so on - this is stuff that I can change easily late in the process without having to fundamentally change the drawing, so it's pretty rough, and mostly just there so I know where it is and can figure out how it works with the finished composition. That's also why it's on a separate layer. Notice that he still has the stubble that I completely forgot about at some point before final inks (I probably should have used something easier to see than yellow here.) Also now that we pretty much know how much space he's taking up, we've got the oval for the frame, drawn with GIMP's oval tool, natch.
Here we've got preliminary inks, mostly to make sure I actually remember how to use the inking tool, and also to digest the underdrawing into basic simple lines.
I'm simplifying the lines a lot because by this point, I'd pretty much decided I was going to go for something stain glass/art nouveau-ish, with jewelly-colors and simple, curvy linework, because: dragonflies! And also I've wanted to do that kind of thing for ages! And also, here is a tip: if you're not confident in your art, copy other peoples' styles. Not "your favorite artist" or "that manga you like", but all kinds of different styles - and learn to think about a style that will work for a given image. Copying other styles makes you actually think about how they're put together, and also, a 'style' is 'a really good artist's set of shortcuts and things they can get away with to make the art go faster'; you probably don't know enough yet to come up with a set of your own that actually work, so steal other artists' for now, and you can still get away with stuff.
And the hair and draperies also in preliminary inks, drawn on a separate layer so I can change them easily without having to re-do the rest of the drawing. I'm using lighter line-weights here mostly because I haven't yet figured out what I'm doing with line weights and I'm testing what I can do with the pen.
This is basically just a color test - what are my final colors going to be? Are they going to work together? How are the lights and darks going to work out? Is this something that's even going to work in color? What can I ignore in the line drawing/etc. because the colors will be dark enough it's not really visible? You can see that I changed things a lot after this, but also that I had the basic red + cyan + green palette already basically figured. (Red and cyan for hemoglobin and hemocynanin and also because tricolor, green because it's specified in the fic, but they make a nice set of jewel tones together. Insect blood really tends more toward the green, tbh, but I wanted to keep the tricolor symbolism, and beside he's an alienbugperson, not a real dragonfly. :P)
You can also see that I put some of the final colors from the wings on the wrong layer here. OOPS.
Here is the point at which I realize that I will never be able to draw properly-shaped, consistent dragonfly wings without tracing, so I get another reference image (this one happens to be from the 'insect wings' entry on wikipedia. What can I say? It made a good reference image.) We can also drop out all the underdrawing now; we're going just on the preliminary inks layer.
And here you see my first wing drawing since the early sketches. You can see I didn't just trace the reference image - I've chopped it up to angle the wings better for the curve of his back, and I've also stretched the image so that one set of wings is slightly longer than the other, giving it something sort of like actual perspective, so the wings on the side he's turning toward us are angled a bit toward the viewer.
Note that other than basic shape, I'm not directly tracing the referenc image - I didn't want an exact copy of any particular dragonfly, and I also decided that freehanding it would be a lot less boring than tracing. This is the point at which I a) desconstruct the vein patterns in dragonfly wings via a lot of staring at internet pictures; b) realize the wings are going to look AMAZING; c) realize the wings are going to be a pain in the ass; d) realize I'm going to have to re-draw the whole thing with more care to my inking, so I stop there because I am totally not going to re-draw the whole thing *twice*.
Okay, we basically know what's up with the wings, so they go away again. Now we've got the final inks layer, and you can see here why I used colors for my other underlayers. You can also see how the final inks layer is altering the preliminary inks in a couple of ways; changing proportions a bit again, messing with the fall of the drapes, etc.
And here's the final inks with the underlayers turned off (as they're going to stay turned off). You can see a bit better in this one that I've also added color to the inks, really dark versions of the eventual flat colors for each form - that didn't happen until a couple of steps later, when I had some coloring done, but it's a kind of neat effect for this kind of line-heavy art, and it's an effect that sometimes works best if it's not really noticeable.
I'm paying a lot more attention to line weight here than in any of the previous layers, with heavy lines around forms and thinner ones for details within forms, but I'm also not paying nearly as much attention as I *should* - the line weights ought to either be staying perfectly consistent within each category, or else making smooth curves that emphasize the three-dimensionality. Unfortunately I am still on the 'please don't suddenly go all wobbly oh goddamit' level, so I called that good enough. (You can also see how little effort I put into the draperies on the bed. It's going to be dark in the final colors - who cares!)
Okay, draw the damn wings. These are done with three different brush sizes, and a pen setting that minimizes variation in line weight, which is what I probably should have done for the main inks too, but oh well. The outlines and heavy veins are actually on a different layer than the really fine veins this time, which made it easier to correct mistakes and to mess with stuff later.
That inner veins layer took me more than four episodes of Night Vale just by itself.
On the plus side, I can now doodle dragonfly wings whenever I get bored of doodling Celtic Knotwork, so it was a good investment of time...
Final colors test; now that I have final inks I can do colors with the capture + fill tools instead of scribbling. You can see I've settled on the basic palette, #024601 green (because if canon gives you a gift like that, use it) and then a rusty-red and a dark cyan built off of that. There's also a dull gold that shows up in the skin and in a lot of the shading, and eventually in the frame. All the colors in the finished work are based on that set of four jeweltone colors. (Joly's a pale-ish redhead not because I have any particular attachment to that headcanon but because it worked with the colors and the lighting really well, and also red hair is among the easiest to shade if you suck at shading hair.) You can see I actually did some shading on this layer, too, mostly to see if it would make the chitin plates look less terrible.
Final color flats - I'm working over this set of final inks+flat colors for all of the rest of it, basically. You can see I accidentally did the shading for the back wall on this layer instead of one of the shading layers. OOPS. You can also see a bit where I mixed a couple of my palette colors with the smudge tool to find colors to shade with. (probably a terrible habit for computer coloring, but some things you pick up in art class in third grade and never quite drop.)
Here we have my shading references - green glass (as was specified in the fic for the chitin) and bossuet holding a candle as my light source. Bossuet was originally sketched in the actual position the light was going to come from, but at that point I had Jolllly facing right, and I realized that a) I wanted Jolllly turning toward Bossuet and the candle, and b) I can only shade from a point lighting source if the light is coming from the upper left, otherwise I confuse myself. Sad but true. So everything got flipped left/right at this point. (I'd flipped left/right several times earlier just to see if everything was still looking okay.)
Here's the base shading layer; the chitin actually came out MUCH better than I was expecting it to, and if you look closely you can sort of even see Bossuet holding the candle! The hair and the skin came out less well, but luckily he was *supposed* to look like he'd been on the verge of death for days, so lank, dead-looking hair and zombie-esque skin tones were all right.
For shading, I was trying to use bright oranges/yellows for the highlights and blues/purples for the shadows, and it did work well for the chitin and reasonably well for the hair and bandages, but not very well on the skin. At that point I probably should have tried something different instead of just slathering on more paint in the same so-dark-they-barely-have-any-hue-left colors - maybe even looked up a skin shading tutorial online - but I was not thinking that clearly by then.
I also did a *lot* of messing with contrast/lightness/saturation/hue here, because I am *never* as brave as I should be with shading, so this is actually much, much more intense shading than I started with.
I'm still really not happy with how the shading came out on most of his skin (okay, the lighter arm is pretty good, although it could probably still do with more gold tones and darke shadows, because candlelight) but I *cannot* get the nice, smooth shading across long gradients that you really need to make skin look right in this style of coloring. I suspect the answer is a) work on a bigger canvas (but I get nervous and way too fiddly about details when I do that. Also, RAM issues), b) use brushes other than the default gimp paintbrushes (ugh, brushes), and c) put in more time on it (...someday). In the meantime this was good enough.
So this layer was meant to just be the bruising etc. around where the wings emerged and the blood on the bandages and a few final details. I probably should have gone more out with the bruising and ichor and general body grossness, but tbh I was in this for pretty bugs, not for body horror, so I wimped out. Also I've never drawn anything like that before and was pretty sure it wouldn't work very well with this style. Also, by this point I was just ready to be DONE with the frickin' drawing so I was going for fast and lazy.
You can see I also decided that the shaded half of his body needed to be darker. You can also see how much more obvious my lack of ability to shade skin nicely is apparent when the contrast is upped. I think the shading looked better in the lighter version, but the darkening makes the image as a whole look better? I probably should have worked a lot more on this until it was something I was actually satisfied with, but I was seriously done with being unable to think about anything else. Luckily, the wings are going to hide a lot of this.
...also I actually kind of like the way the bandages turned out even though I had no idea what I was doing with them; I guess all the togas I used to draw paid off? They really do look like something from a stained-glass window, and the tricolor-of-blood-and-ichor idea actually sort of worked.
The wings are actually four different layers at this point - outlines/thick veins, inner veins, tricolor flags, and transparent background. That way I could set the transparencies differently for all of them and mess with the colors/etc. And I ended up doing a lot of that as I tried to find a wing color that worked well with the colors I ended up with in finish shading, as you'll see in the final image they ended up a much more green-toned color.
(You also see here how I had a dark-green background layer I was occasionally swapping out for the white, to see how it would look against different backgrounds, especially in the transparent version.)
And the last step, the detailing in the frame. I'd sort of been thinking about this in the background since I started working on it, but it was still really improvised and last minute. (And if you look closely you'll note that the crosshair that I used to line up the radial lines was still visible in the image I originally posted to tumblr. OOPS.) I ended up using a really sloppy set of gradients + manual highlights and it actually came out much better than it had any right to, hooray!
...and the final image!
This is exactly half the size of the working image (the images above are at 1/3 size); I probably should have been working a lot bigger but smaller is less intimidating and less likely to crash my computer.
Anyway, yes! That is how I make art, hoorah. I hope this has at least done something to reveal to you that sometimes sheer bloody-mindedness and Google Images can make up for what one doesn't got in terms of talent, skill, and discipline.
(also if anyone would like to critique you're welcome to, bearing in mind that I am quite well aware of all the things that are wrong with this image.)
Just for fun, here's a not-dissimilar image I drew about ten years ago, so we can all be depressed by how little I've improved in a decade:
...not much, then
Also here's an animation of just the color layers. I think I actually like just-the-shading-layer best...
Wow!
Also, I see a LOT of improvement between the old picture and the current one. Some of my artist friends, I've actually known for 10 years or more so I got to see the progression live. It's pretty exciting.
I should be so lucky as to have anyone illustrate my work this well.