Batwoman (DC Comics) WIP 1

Batwoman (DC Comics) WIP 1

The original Batgirl was never really one of my favorites. When I was first reading coming it was with Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown. That said, when Batwoman came around I was intrigued. Greg Ruka is an excellent writer and I wanted to see what he would do with it. And what he did was crazy. Batwoman was t’s own thing and fir into the bat world in a very different way than anyone else. She was down to earth and, in a way, more realistic than the big bat but at the same time she was immediately thrust into some of the weirdest and darkest corners of the DC universe. The religion of crime and the monsters from the deep. It was cool and different and I liked it.

The visuals were a mixed bag for me. I dug the costume but one particular choice left me scratching my head. Why on earth is Kate that pale? Seriously, unless she’s an albino no skin should be that pale. I could maybe go with it if it were something that she put on as part of the costume to throw people off further, she wears a wig with it too, after all, but no. That’s just her skin tone. And the new show has made the very interesting choice of giving her a flip of hair that goes over the front of her mask. I can’t even. I’m just going to have to redesign this thing myself. 

#batwoman #rubyrose #katekane #dccomics #art #procreate

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 5

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 5

So, I finally got her hair done. Lol. Dang, but I’m liking where this thing is going. Somewhat similar to what I had to do for Mina in my last piece this piece has a lot of trial and error. Mostly the problem was getting the forms of the hair right. Aloy has this particular hair style where she’s got what amount to three large rows in her hair and then then sides are tied and then the back falls down. It looks cool, its more practical than it seems and it’s hella hard to draw. Getting the angels size and shape down are just the start of it. Then you have to make it seem like hair supports it. 

On top of all that I then have to go over the top of all that and do the braid in her hair. Which turned out to be the easiest part because I made a brush superficially to do braids. All I have to do is lay down the form with the brush and then highlight and low light. Simple, fast, and for sale in my gumroad. 

With the body pretty much done I can now turn to the clothing. Aloy has a lot of really interesting armors and styles but I didn’t want to just ape one of another of them. Instead I’m going to be going with a kind of half armor thing and no boots. The whole idea is that this is a day off. She’s not fighting she’s not running around so she’s taking some time to chill out. In this case that means she’s stripped off most of the top layers of her armor and is sitting around in what amounts to her under clothes. A wrap top and some soft pants tied around the waist. What I like about it is that it’s going to be Carja in style and color so it can be a gift from the Sun-King. One of his kind-of-sort-of woo Aloy things. Which she took because it’s damn comfortable. And then ran off into the woods with it.

I don’t normally talk about this stuff, but I’m loving where the color values are right now. There’s a lot of harmonization going on right now with the sky and her. It looks like a bright open piece and I’m really digging that right now. May change when I get to the background but we’ll see.

#horizonzerodawn #aloy #gaming #videogames #art #procreate

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 4

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 4

Aloy is still a little red here but I’m going to go with it. Not least of which reason is because I freaking love how well he anatomy has turned out so far. Its soft and organic but still defined enough that it’s easy to tell what everything is. I still have a couple of places where I want to make changes, like the side of the left breast because it’s noticeably smaller than the right and the shadows on her foot, but this is working out really well for me so far. I did also have to add her right ear because I realized I was going to have to add her ear piece or it wouldn’t read as Aloy without it. 

One thing I’ve noticed is that these short blog posts really help me to get my head on straight as far as my process goes. I do them the next morning at work with the WIP image on the work computer next to me. It gives me a chance to sit back and consider where I am and where I want to go and what needs fixing. Amazingly I’ve sometimes gotten more out of blogging than I have out of just doing the thing. 

Her hair is going to be a challenge. Not in the same way that #Mina’s hair was a problem, but in its own way. Aloy has her hair bound up in these thick rows and she’s got braids. It’s a pretty complicated hair patter to draw even if, as I understand it, it would actually be a pretty practical hair style.

#horizonzerodawn #aloy #gaming #videogames #art #procreate

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 3

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 3

I really love this stage of the process. As much as I used to complain about it when I was doing the whole thing in grayscale and then having to go back in and color it, I do like how the piece looks when it’s just in greyscale. It’s just annoying when the coloring comes in. That said, this is awesome.

Working like this has let me focus down more on what I am doing with just the light and how that light shapes the form of what I’m painting. If you’ll notice my shading and form work is a lot more delicate here that it has been in a lot of my pieces. It’s been a gradual process but it’s getting there.

#horizonzerodawn #aloy #gaming #videogames #art #procreate

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 2

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 2

I wanted Aloy out in nature, the ruined but renewed world of the far future. I’m going for a composition that shows off the decay but also the nature foreign on top of it. I may also have to go back. I also want ally in a somewhat relaxed position. She’s out in her element and she’s taking  break. The sunlight is going to be coming in from the left side but there is going to be plenty of ambient light and particulate matter in the air since she’s outside.

On thing that’s going to be hard to play is the plant life intros place. I want there to be a lot of it, but it’s gong to change how the lighting works, more green and such going on. 

I also have to consider what, if anything, I’m going odd with the tech side of things since this is very much a world that mixes the two things. And I’m not great at drawing tech stuff very well.

#horizonzerodawn #aloy #gaming #videogames #art #procreate

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 1

Aloy (Horizon: Zero Dawn) WIP 1

Horizon: Zero Dawn occupies this really interesting space for me where I know that this game is fantastic and I own it…but I’ve never finished it. Initially the difficulty was part of the appeal. I grew up playing games that had no easy mode. But Horizon: Zero Dawn may just be too much of a throwback considering how much time I actually have to play and devote to getting better at the game. 

Regardless of that, the aesthetics of the game are nothing short of breathtaking. Even from the opening moment the game presents a world that is just flat out amazing. It’s broad a wild and so unique with how it mixes the mechanical and the natural. 

And of course there is Aloy herself. She’s such good character! she smart and tough but not in an impossible kind of way. She’s relatable to a degree that’s really hard to get right in video games. Her storyline is incredible. Going from outcast to hero to throwing off the trapping of iconography and worship. She’s just fantastic. 

#horizonzerodawn #aloy #gaming #videogames #art #procreate

Momo x Mina (My Hero Academia) WIP 5

Not a ton of overall progress here between the last version and this one. Might have something to do with getting a little absorbed into watching the Good Place while I was working on this. 

But that wasn’t what really killed the time. No, that was Mina’s hair. Damn but that was a lot of work. I had to redo the whole thing three times to try and work my way into a technique that kind of sorta of worked, but it was really just trial and error and going into the undo and trying to fix what I messed up in the last five minutes. More than once I thought to myself the it might be better for me to just abandon this and do something else, but I kept going back to it. In the end it was really just a matter of a thousand small steps culminating into one thing. Medium curls laying out the shape, don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. Then the low highlights to give them curve. Darker lights to show where the curls emerge and disappear from the mass, brighter highlights to signal where the most light is hitting. 

Once I had the shape done it was just about color burning and highlighting the whole mass with color dodge to give the whole thing a shape from a lighting perspective. I still have to play with it because the level of shine is a little unreal and I think i want it to contrast to her skin it’s a little more. Right now, it looks washed out in context, but I’m happy with where it is as this point.

Happy enough that I can move on to doing the basic silhouette for the costume anyway. So far, I haven’t messed with Momo’s too much, I just wanted to get a feel for how her original costume works on this frame. Might keep it for a variant. But I’m set on doing a different version of the costume. Her costume doesn’t have much in the way of leg covering so i might work with that. In her case, I know costume design follows function, as sexy as it is, Momo’s power requires skin to be showing. But I think we can do something that’s a little more covering and sexier at the same time. Maybe be little pseudo garter belt situation. I’m also going to be changing the belt. I love the idea of the Yaoyorictionary but I don’t buy for a second that she wouldn’t have upgraded that into some kind of digital format. Maybe I’ll do a wrist device for her to act as the Yaoyorictionary. 

Mina is going to be simpler. I’ve decided to simplify her costume down into a one piece unitarded that covers most of her body. That can appear to be really simple but I’m going to be overlaying her classic camo pattern on the outfit and lining it in such a way as to create the feel and look of high shine latex with ribbing at the right places. I want to do as much as i can to get interesting textures.

#momoyaoyorozu #myheroacademia #minaashido #bnha #procreate #MHA

Momo x Mina (My Hero Academia) WIP 4

And color. So, there were a few issues here that I needed to correct when I removed the saturation layer. 

First of all, when I removed the gray scaling I realized the the color tone I picked for Momo had way too much yellow in it for me. A lot of skin tones have yellow in them but there’s a point where it becomes oversaturated that you just need to step back and correct it. Which, fortunately, I was able to do. One thing that really helped was when I went in with the overlay to add variances to the skin. It really helps to make it pop and not be so flat. 

The coloring on Mina was a trip. Normally I deepen shadows with a cool color and hilight thinner areas with a warm color with overlay. But on her I had to be really careful about which colors I used and how much because in a couple of places I missed stepped and gave her way too much blue and she wound up looking bruised. With an alien skin tone like this you have to be careful about balancing. I want her skin to appear believable, but not quite human, so the blue shading in a couple of spots kind of work. As if her skin is refracting light differently than normal skin would be. I did something similar when I did chloe in my Monster prom piece.

The hands have worked out all in this piece. I’m trying to focus less on specific anatomy and more on the transitions in the planes of the hand. Then I render them out in light and shadow. I think so far it’s giving it a more natural look.

Faces on this one were interesting, I did them back to back and Momo and Mina have very different facial structures and features, I gave Mina a wider mouth and larger eyes, whereas Momo’s eyes are smaller and her mouth more puckered. I also differentiated them in their level of makeup. Momo is clearly waring lipstick and eyeshadow. Mina on the other hand, Even though she is wearing makeup, doesn’t look like she’s wearing much. Her monochromatic skin and hair blend it all down into a rather fresh look that works with her characterization. 

Ok. Time to work on the thing that’s going to kill me. Their hair. Moms not so much…Mina, Mina’s going to be a challenge.

#momoyaoyorozu #myheroacademia #minaashido #bnha #procreate #MHA

Momo x Mina (My Hero Academia) WIP 3

So far this is working out relatively well. Don’t want to Jinx it but so far I like it. We’ll see where we are when I remove the saturation layers and I can see what they look like underneath. The forms of their bodies and their anatomy are working so far even though I wish I knew how to add al little more complexity and depth to them. But that might just be me dealing with my instinct to make them ripped. 

One thing I know I messed up already with the anatomy is the heights. Momo is supposed to be the tallest girl in class by a significant margin, but here it looks like Mina is taller. Part of that could be the hair but she’s not quite on model. The thing is I don’t know if I can or should even try to fix it at this point. My instincts say don’t mess with it or you might ruin the whole thing. I could give it a try in a copy file but that feels a lot like temping the gods of digital destruction.

It’s always really interesting to work on a multiple character piece because of just how much trickery goes into fooling the eye into seeing what isn’t there. These two characters are on entirely separate layers but in order to make you think they’re together I have to control where the shadows and interactions are so that it looks like they’re a single continuous element. It’s not orders of magnitude greater than what I have to do in order to make you believe that Momo’s legs are crossed or that her hand is resting on her hip, but there’s a lot more of it and it all has to work out or the viewer flat out won’t believe it. The human eye is built to pick out these discrepancies and it could easily ruin the piece if I’m not careful.

#momoyaoyorozu #myheroacademia #minaashido #bnha #procreate #MHA

Momo x Mina (My Hero Academia) WIP 2

In terms of composition, storytelling, and tone I went simple. My last Yuri piece was in the street, it was cooler pastels and it was not that intimate. This time I wanted to do something a little softer. It’s a bedroom scene, its more intimate and it’s going to be a lot softer. The attention of the characters is going to be on each other, their eyes are going to be going to one another, their stances are more supportive, they’re reaching out to one another not in a gaping way but more for reassurance. I might do a composition side by side once this piece is done and contrast that with my last Yuri piece to highlight how just a few changes tell a very different story. 

I’m doing my saturation trick again to make sure that I can work with these characters and think of their values and just turn off a layer and have my coloring done. 

Coming from Anime, both of these characters have distinctive hair that is either going to be joy to work with or a giant pain in the ass. Momo probably won’t be so bad because, apart from how her bangs and ponytail, work she’s got fairly straight hair. Mina on the other hand has this huge bush of super curly hair and that’s going to be a huge problem to get right. That amount of curl is difficult to get right. Thing is, I can't not do it this way. If I’m going to do my best version of this character I have to do my best version of the character and that means going big with the hair when the safe option would be to go small.

#momoyaoyorozu #myheroacademia #minaashido #bnha #procreate #MHA

Momo x Mina (My Hero Academia) WIP 1

There was no way I was going to skip out on painting a character from My Hero Academia. I absolutely love the show. Normally, I prefer my superhero universes, and anime in particular, to be darker and grittier but there’s something about how MHA handles the old tropes that really appeals to me. Like how Deku is the protagonist and he has to start at the bottom in order to make the climb, but he’s never treated as an idiot as a way to allow the show to give you an info dump. Instead he gets all exited and starts info dumping and the other characters get on his case about it. And I love how the show treats ambition not as a horrible thing that must be cast aside in order to grow, but as something to drive your growth forward. It’s kind of the Anit-Naruto in that way, which has a much greater focus on a collective achievement. Wait…I think I just did a Deku rant. AWESOME!!!

One thing that even MHA hasn’t been able to cure me of however is that I’m never a big fan of the main female character that we’re supposed to love. I prefer the side characters because they’re more interesting. Asui is up there but I want to do a piece of just her eventually. For my first MHA piece I wanted to go big, so I went with two of my favorite female characters from the show. 

Momo is totally best girl in that show. Not only is her power the exact one that I would want to have, she’s a character that is powered by her intelligence and she’s willing to break rules when it comes to saving her friends. She was the only girl out of that whole crew who went after Bakugo and they would never have found him without her. Plus, she suffers from a fear of failure that is all too familiar for me.

Mina’s just flat out fun. She’s a generally happy person, but she’s still got that fire to win. What I love about her, beside her look, is that she honestly believes that things will work out if she just keeps going forward. More than that, she believes in people. When Kaminari tells her that he wants to go to UA she’s one of the few people that doesn’t make fun of him for not having a flashy power. She believes he can do it. She’s going to be beat him to be the best, but she knows he can make the climb.

#momoyaoyorozu #myheroacademia #minaashido #bnha #procreate #MHA

Tracer WIP 5

Tracer WIP 5

And now we have the revel of costume and how its going to be different. 

I wanted to go with something a little darker and edgier for Tracer. So I’ve ditched the goggles and related them with warpaint over her eyes and a face mask. The harness and body suit are going to be different as well I want something a little more stealth, so this is a dark variant on the suit, made for getting in and and out places she shouldn’t be. I’ve really been enjoying playing around with doing alternate signs for costumes and this is kind of a natural extension of my aesthetic. I think I might also add some armored sections to her shins and arms I do still want to get across the need stop support her body as she moved at high speeds.

Also, the hair was both sun and surprisingly smooth to work on. I usually have a lot go problems with hair but this kind of felt natural to do even without goo reference. Because really, where are you going to give good reference for how the hair is supposed to look like in real life.

#tracer #overwatch #blizzard #widowmaker #beautiful #art #procreate

Tracer WIP 4

Tracer WIP 4

And now we can see how the piece looks underneath the grayscale and I could not be happier at this point in the process. Part of it is the adjustment and the overlay layers I’ve put in to add a little but of skin variation but the skin layer can stand on its own even without that stuff. I have plenty of pieces where I just never did it. It’s sickly textured and has a nice soft feel. 

I’m ok with what i’ve been able to do with her face so far. I went with a really subtle eyeshadow just to deepen the contrast but didn’t go overboard. Tracer is kind of fresh faced so you can’t do too much of that stuff. I may need to do some work around her mouth however, I wanted to give her a mugging expression. She’s posing after all. But i don’t think I’ve got it quite where I want it I may need to knock to lipstick color back and got with more of a pink to lighten her up a  bit.

Or I may ignore all that and go darker to give her a goth look. I’m not going to be sticking to any particular skin so I might as well go a little nuts with it.

#tracer #overwatch #blizzard #widowmaker #beautiful #art #procreate

Tracer WIP 3

Tracer WIP 3

I really like where the piece is right now and Im really happy with two bog changes I’ve made to try and help things along. 

The first is that I’ve given up working in pure grayscale, i hate what that does to me alter on in the process when I’m trying o color in the skin and I go nuts because it’s just not good enough, I’m never satisfied with the skin. But what’s that you say? I’m woking in grayscale right now? Ah! that would be the workaround that I’ve found. 

I first i did a tonal map to make sure i was only getting the contrast that i wanted. Then i overlaid that with a color layer I then color picked those colors and adjusted them for for saturation and tonal value to add warmth to the shadow colors. And boom, perfectly graduated skin tones. However there’s still another step. In order to make absolutely sure I’m getting the values I want I set a clipping mack over the body flat layer, set it to saturate and fill the lair wth black, rendering everything underneath in grayscale. Then I just paint on a layer clipped between the body flat layer and the saturation layer. And done. I’m working in grayscale for the skin. 

It might sound a little complicated, because it is, but I’ve found it really effective at giving me the best of both worlds. My values are on point and underneath the saturation layer it’s going to look really good…I hope. We’ll see once I take off the saturation layer and start working on the rest of the body.

#tracer #overwatch #blizzard #widowmaker #beautiful #art #procreate

Tracer WIP 1

Tracer WIP 1

Overwatch is one of those games that I don’t play but I love the lore of. I’m just not a big fan of run and shoot type games, I’m a strategist at heart. That said, one of the characters that stood out to me when I was looking into the game was Tracer. She’s kind of the kid in the whole thing, despite being much older than she looks. She’s the optimist, the believer in the idea that things can get better. She’s the cavalry and she’s here to make sure things get better.

For her positioning and lines I went with something a little unbalanced. I didn’t want her to be in a resting state, not really, this is just a hold state between two action beats. It’ll be a lot clearer later int he process but Tracer here is supposed to be giving the camera a little cheesecake in between her runs. I like the idea that she does this kind of thing all the time, Mugs at the camera because she can and get away with it without anyone noticing because she’s moving so fast.

#tracer #overwatch #blizzard #widowmaker #beautiful #art #procreate

Tracer WIP 2

Tracer WIP 2

For the composition, I wanted something a little special. Overwatch takes place in a futuristic world an I wanted to make sure that this piece had some of that in it. Part of that is going to be Tracer’s costume when i get to that part of it, but another bit is going to be the setting. A futuristic city like there are in the game. All angles and Steel and glass. 

I also tried to pay some attention to the values of the piece for once. It’s not something i really notice most of the time but i’ve been trying to be a little better lately. Tracer is going to be in lighter values to set her against her background. She’s also going to have a lot of fluidity to her because of what I’m planning to do with her powers.

#tracer #overwatch #blizzard #widowmaker #beautiful #art #procreate

She-Hulk WIP 5

Working with She-Hulks hair was a problem in a different way than i’m used to. Because her hair is a dark green the highlights and lowlights are a little tricky to get right but I wanted to make her hair vibrant. I’m confident I at least got the flow of it right and It’s got some life. Now I’m just worried I went al little too far and gave her neon hair. I like where it is though.

Women’s Fashion isn’t something I’m all that well versed on so I had to solicit some help in picking out She-Hulk’s outfit. I knew I wanted a skirt but I needed some help in picking out the style and the jacket. Went with a trumpet skirt and a jacket that has a seminal ruffle thing at the back to give it a little symmetry. 

So, the problem. Her legs and thighs. As you can see from the earlier WIP images, I had originally planned on making her legs in line. Then i had this wonderful idea to change it so that her legs are crossed. It would be sexier, I told myself. And then this happened. Took me a while to see it but once I did there was no way not to see it. With her leg crossed, her hips would be aligned differently and with them as they are, her hips seem like they’re dislocated.Now that I know what the problem is i know what i need to fix, but this is always the hard part about working on something. No plan of attack survives first contact with the enemy. No line art survives the painting process.

#shehulk #marvel #hulk #sensationalshehulk #jenniferwalters #procreate

She-Hulk WIP 4

For once the process of coloring in the skin wasn’t so bad, probably because I’m working with an obviously unnatural skin tone. Lowering the initial contrast in the piece was also really helpful because it didn’t seem quite so alien to me anymore. Also, the overlay where I added a bit of saturation and variance to her skin worked out quite well. I went with a  dark red color because the purple i sometimes use was giving her a bruised look that I was not happy with.

I did make a mistake however. While working on this piece I started adjusting her face, a little here and there trying to correct some errors in my original lines. Only to discover while working on this writeup that I had completely messed up the face by making it to small in comparison to the rest of her body. That and just taking the character out of it. look at it next to the previous pieces. Her nose has lost all character. Fortunately, this is something I can fix. But it goes to show the importance of stepping back sometimes and looking at your work from a distance so you don’t make these kinds of mistakes.

#shehulk #marvel #hulk #sensationalshehulk #jenniferwalters #procreate

She-Hulk WIP 3

One of the things I love about working with a character like She-Hulk is that she’s supposed to be jacked, that means I can go a little hog wild with her musculature. I love doing defined musculature on a woman. There’s something about the marriage of that kind of strength with femininity that I find really compelling. Normally i do that with abs but this time I wanted to do a back piece and show off those lats. I assume thats what those muscles are called, anyway. 

I also added a lot of definition to there more visible arm. I’ve gotten some negative feedback about making arms too muscular but I believe in ridden that edge and pushing my girls are far as they can go. 

#shehulk #marvel #hulk #sensationalshehulk #jenniferwalters #procreate

She-Hulk WIP 2

This is almost going to be the reverse of my Proviso piece with Harley Quinn. In that piece Harley was in warm tones and the setting around her was in cools. Here, almost by necessity, She-Hulk is going to be in cools and the background is going to be warm. Since She-hulk is green skin and haired she needs to be set against a background that will make her stand out. When it comes time for it, I’m going to be reinforcing this When it comes tim for costuming. She’s gong to be in her traditional colors of white and purple.

In terms of composition and mood for this piece, I wanted to go with an early morning scene or a late night scene. Court hasn’t been called or has just closed and Jennifer is reflective a little somber. She’s about to step into the ring in  a way that’s completely different than fighting a supervaillan and requires a…pause… contemplation of her weapons and the battle to come.

#shehulk #marvel #hulk #sensationalshehulk #jenniferwalters #procreate