rendering process wow you should totally click on this

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Yippee (Please do not steal, trace, re-post, re-color, feed my art into AI, heavily reference, etc. etc. the whole shebang) Click the arrows on screen or on a keyboard to navigate!! Read below if you wanna watch me yap my head off about what I’m doing… This is the second rendering walk through I’ve done, (Here’s the first I’m crying: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1292204827/) it was only four months ago but it feels like it’s been AWHILE. It’s the same character, my lovely son Deki, because I just finished his redesign and reference sheet. Fundamentally, I think I’ve improved quite a lot in four months, a little too fast for my brain to keep up if I’m being completely honest. It’s led to quite a few inconsistencies in my art style, but I’m working on ironing it out. The Yap: (Written somewhat formally because I started making this right after I finished listening to a documentary. The media we consume is the media we create I suppose.) 1 - Rough sketch: Welcome to the scariest part of my drawing process, visually that is. The circles for eyes are a little off putting, I know. I technically have another step (sometimes multiple steps) before this, it’s like a ‘step zero’ of sorts. Step zero is really just a ton of messy lines drawing out the general shape of the figure. It kinda just looks a big red scribble (because for some reason, I always have to do my first sketch in red) but I’m able to make sense of it. Sometimes I have multiple step zeros, depending on whether or not I used a reference. I used a reference for this piece and followed it fairly closely, so I was able to easily make sense of the figure. On pieces were I don’t use a reference, or follow one loosely, I often have a couple primitive sketches that progressively get better as I can make a clearer picture of what I want. 2 - Refined sketch: I decided against doing traditional line art for this piece, as I want to get better at lineless or at the very least, thin line art. There’s always two little voices in the back of my head whenever I’m drawing. One, that tells me to make thin and smooth line art, while the other tells me to make noticeable and bold line art (always with a thick border around the subject). They both look great if I fully commit to one or the other, but most of the time I end up doing something in between, or worse, end up switching back and forth during the drawing. Basically, where I was going with this is that I wanted to render first, and add line art as I render. I don’t know if that makes sense, but hopefully it will as the steps progress. I also like this step quite a lot because it’s the step that actually determines the character. I went into this drawing knowing I was going to draw Deki, but there are some sketches where I determine the character after the fact. It’s just nice to see it start to come together. 3 - Flat colors: At this point I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for the background, I just wanted him to be sitting on a rock. Somewhere. Maybe in the mountains? A forest? The beach? Maybe it could be a log too. Lore wise, he had to be somewhere cold, he only wears this outfit during the winter or whenever it's cold out… Speaking of his outfit, I quite like how his re-design turned out. Plus I finally brought myself to draw his hat, which is one of my favorite aspects of his design, but it’s a bit of a pain to draw. 4 - Background: I settled on somewhat of a snowy rock situation. It’s quite abstract, but I needed something in the background to determine what colors I would use to shade. I added more mountains in later, along with more snow. 5 - Rendering skin: At this point I set the ‘line art’ opacity to 10% so I could better see what I was doing. I’ll end up going back and adding more shading to the skin, but this is enough for the time being. I used to despise shading skin, it always turned out muddy and not life like. I used to heavily rely on multiply and screen layers, which make skin in particular look wrong. It would look overly saturated in places, and I didn’t fully understand how to render skin at the time. Or render anything well, if I’m being honest… 6 - Eyes + skin touch ups: Shaded eyes and added more darker lines to places I previously rendered. For as much of a pain and hands are to draw, they are quite fun to render… 7 - Hair: I used to really enjoy rendering hair, and it was always the most advanced part of my art. What I mean is that the hair always looked good and everything else… didn’t... I always got tons of compliments on the way I rendered hair, but as I’ll mention later, I was pushing myself too far around this time. So I scaled everything back, rendering wise, for a little bit. But now I’m getting back into the flow of it all, and returning to my old ways of rendering hair. I definitely used too big of a canvas for this to look good on scratch… Oh well… (Continued in notes and credits)