more insight on saving disasters, AKA: another normal picture.

It's become my super-power to take things that I'm 100% sure are un-salvageable and somehow make them into things that are at the very least passingly okay. As people from DA know, my latest round in the I-want-to-kill-myself-Olympics came from the fact that I have not been having a good art week. (Or at least any luck with art.) So I'ma show you what I had to deal with because its a visual record for my own sake + watching me get mad at inanimate objects is hilarious.

Let me preface this whole argument with the following statements: Most artists stay within the drawing niche of what they are good at. I like drawing humans, or at least human looking things. I am not currently good at drawing architecture or anthros. I avoid drawing anything with a muzzle at all costs.

With those statements out of the way, let it be known I did about 3 sets of lineart for this that I all thought were absolutely wretched until I came up with the current ones, and was happy with how they turned out. I was shooting to do the under-painting in BW (like this picture) and then color over it in photoshop (alá  similar technique to Adi Granov since I've been way into his art lately.) Here's where the problems started. When I put down the first wash of ink, I noticed it was not at all even and it looked like I had salted the paper. I was using recycled archival matboard I snagged from the artshop 6 years ago that I have frittered away for later use, only to realize as I was watching the paper seperate from the actual matboard that "oh, I bet being in an open box for that long really messed up the humidity in the adhesive." The paper, when dried, literally separated half-off the matboard backing, and looked like this:








...I almost cried. I was looking at this thing drying on my kitchen counter as if someone had stabbed my cat and just left it in the sink. The lineart I worked on (and the only one that I actually liked!) was gone. By then I figured I'd just start over, but I was mad enough at the picture that after a few days I was like "no, I'm not going to let you win crappy art supplies. I will be victorious!" Me saving art from myself is the equivalent of a WOW-tard finally getting a toon into full t10.







The steps above are basically a deconstruction of all the layers as I worked on them in chronological order, but here's the rundown of what happened:

1. The first thing I was going to save was the lineart, so I had to go through and tracewhatever I could off of the scan. I think I lost some of the minor details, but I was able to capture most of them so it worked out okay.
2. When I get done with lines, I build the shadows up first so I have a base on what the form looks like. I can also start gauging how dark stuff gets. If this was done on paper, I would have had to build it up with a combination of ink and pencils/colerase, so I tried really hard to mimic it in Photoshop as naturally as I could.
3. Highlights! Again, these are usually done with a combination of soft pencils + white gouache, but I had to fake it as best as I could. I dont like the highlights as much as the shadows because I was finding it really hard to imitate the softness of a pencil on the grain of paper.
4. Flat colors were laid down. In this one I did a layer of flats on multiply so that the shading i did in photoshop would show through. When I was satisfied, I duplicated the layer under itself and set that one to overlay so that I could get some color into the shadows.( I don't like most of the art where the coloring is in B&W and the color layer is just multiplied on top of it because all of the shadows look too muddy and gray. Making an overlay/color layer to tint all the shadows helps to alleviate that.)
5. Beefed up the color-multiply layer with shadows and highlights. the picture started to take on a little more form at that point.
6. Because the bottom layer was so muddy and it was hard to build the precise details I could have with inks and pencils, I went over the top of the image and picked out tiny details with an opaque layer. Mainly this was just adding little things to the leather parts of the armor.
7. Melonball (the gal I did this for) was really specific about wanting the t10 Druid helm, so I had to make sure to get it in there. Plus, I don't do near the amount of glow effects in my art as I used to, so it gave me a change to give her a little crescent lightbulb on her head. :)
8. I hate blizzards armor designs. They are so clunky and ugly, they don't read as battle realistic at all. For some reason, Blizzard put a bunch of these little moons into the t10 druid armor (must have been some sort of Nelf-lore throwback...). More glow, and more painting on some cast lighting in the vicinity.
9. The moon behind her actually turned out sort of neat because of how the ink just happened to stipple and pool in that specific area.

The part of the image you don't see between number 9 and the end result is some minor color tweeking on the overall image to make it seem more like a semi-lit night picture. If I could explain my entire experience with this picture, it is this: