ART PROCESS (Step-by-Step)

Instructions

Hello! Here is an art process tutorial, for beginners out there who might be interested in learning how I make a drawing start to finish in order to better help art skills! I did make one of these art process tutorials a while back on one of my inactive accounts, and I figured I should make another one. 1. Sketch! In this one I tried doing a certain perspective effect, I think it turned out pretty good. 2. Lineart! Gosh, in this specific piece the lineart took me SO long, especially on the wings. But anyways, lineart is just a way to draw over your sketch to make it look cleaner. Always make sure to put the lineart layer OVER the sketch layer 3. Hide the sketch layer, look how clean and pretty! 4. This part is never talked about enough. ADD LINE WEIGHT! To me it honestly just makes a huge difference and makes the lineart pop out more, and it also makes it easier to color in between the lines. 5. Here are the brushes I use by the way. I use a nice textured brush for my lineart and other effects, and I use a solid brush for coloring, lighting and shading. As you can see I also made the background color different, because when I start coloring it will be easier to see if I go outside the lines or not. This is a really nice trick for when coloring light characters, as it is hard to see light colors against a white canvas. 6. Heres the reference for the character I'm drawing! For context, she is a celestial being in the form of a unicorn luck dragon thing? By the way, I still don't have a name for her yet, so I'm open to recommendations! 7. Create a layer under the lineart, and carefully color around the edges with your solid brush, using the "base" color of the design--in other words, I consider the base color the color that shows up most often in the design. 8. Color fill! Super fast and easy and it looks real nice and clean. 9. Add a new layer above the base color layer but below the lineart layer, and set it to clipping mask. This makes it so you don't color outside the base color layer, but on a completely new layer! This saves SO much time, trust me. 10. Here's me coloring in the secondary color on the clipping mask layer. Very nice. 11. Now basically you just want to put every color layer on clipping mask to the base color layer. 12. Here's me coloring in the tertiary color, and I added a new "extras" layer. 13. On the extras layer, I typically color anything that isn't a part of the fur that needs to be in the front. This usually includes eyes, paw pads, scales, eyeshadow, etc. 14. Finished product after coloring is complete! 15. Merge all color layers into the base color layer to stay organized. 16. Duplicate color layer and lineart layer, and merge them together. 17. Move combined color & lines layer to the very top. We'll save this for later. 18. Underneath the color layer, choose the base colors you want for the background. Here I picked some purply blues and added an ombre effect with an airbrush. Typically I always have a light source, so I make the ombre get lighter where the light source is going to be. 19. Now go back to the combined color & lines layer, set it to alpha lock, and fill the layer with the darkest color you used in the background. Then set it to multiply, and adjust the opacity to your liking. 20. Above that layer, create a new layer or two for lighting. Set that layer to add, and adjust the opacity to your liking. 21. Now, create a new layer and move it underneath the lineart layer and set it to multiply. You're also gonna want to enable the clipping mask again. This is gonna be where you do your detailed shading. 22. WOAHH SO PRETTYYY.. So basically for detailed shading, I block out areas in which I know for a fact the light wont hit. This is usually limbs in the back, upper half of the eyes, etc. Then I add shaded detail in all the fur tufts and stuff like that. Adjust opacity to your liking. 23. Now with the combined color & lines layer from before, erase with an airbrush where the light is going to hit. (SOFTLYY) 24. Now make another layer under the lineart, making sure its above our detailed shading layer. Set this one to add-- this is gonna be our detailed lighting layer. On this layer I highlight areas where the light does hit, with the lightest color in the background. Adjust opacity to your liking. Oh yeah, I also moved the combined color & lines layer to underneath the detailed shading. 25. Duplicate color layer and lineart layer again and merge them. Set it to alpha lock, and fill with the same color you used for detailed lighting. Erase with an airbrush where the light doesn't hit, and adjust the opacity to your liking. Make sure this layer is ABOVE the shaded one, but below the detailed shading/lighting layers! 26. Okay.. so, a lot has changed. But its not that complicated! All I did was put some detail to the background, above the bg base layer. I set all of them to add because there's stars, and well.. stars make light.