#I may color this but I love the lineart enough I'm gonna put it off for now hahaha

[songofstrawhats]

Luffy Week Day 4- Emotion

One of the things I am most fascinated by in One Piece is the continuity between this small angry child, and the happy-go-lucky pirate he becomes.

I think it's all still in there, he just knows more now!!!

[ssalballoon]

Whats your art process and what would you reccomend for someone who would like to achieve a style similar to yours? i love this mix of cartoonism and realism. your work is such an inspiration >.<

oh gosh! thank you?! 💞 i'll do my best to explain it, but even I have a difficult time trying to understand my own art process/style because of how inconsistent it is;; (i still have a lot to learn!) this is gonna be a long reply so i'll place it under the cut

process:

I start loose with a more gesture type rough sketch. I mainly just do lineart in the same layer as my sketch and erase away parts I don't like. Sometimes I'll lower the sketch's opacity and on a new layer do my lineart (which is what i did for the drawing above). But regardless doing that loose gesture sketch helps keep my drawing dynamic even as I refine over top of it!

- I duplicate layers A LOT for safekeeping my previous progress, especially if I'm thinking of making a big change (ex. changing limb position)

If I wanna put colors down underneath it I set my lineart to Multiply. For coloring I'm very inconsistent with the process, but recently I've been using a more subjective coloring style, where I pick my own shadows and highlights to try relying less on blending modes (which is gonna be too long to get into here;;) Finally if I feel like it, I make a layer on top of my lineart layer where I render everything

Oh this is something that helps me a lot for colors! I have 2 layers that are a mid-gray tone placed above all my other layers. One I set to the Color mode (to make the drawing black and white), and the other I set to the Luminosity blending mode (to make the drawing's brightness the same..?not sure)

The Color layer helps me check if I have enough contrast in values, and the Luminosity layer helps me check if I have enough contrast in color hue and saturation!

style:

This is really difficult to answer because style encompasses so many different aspects of art, but I'll try to focus my answer on the mix of cartoonism and realism that you mentioned!

I struggled trying to explain what my style is like so I just broke down one of my drawings that exemplifies a lot of my stylizations! Hopefully these can give you some pointers about what I tend to think about when I draw (click for higher quality)

(+to add to this i use a brush with no size pressure, only opacity pressure)

What I recommend for stylizing a realistic character: The way I learned to stylize a more realistic character like this one was to import a reference of his face, then trace over it very deliberately, making sure to stick to big shapes and characterizing details I thought were important to achieve his likeness! Then I'd turn the reference layer off and freehand it over and over, comparing and redrawing until I managed to get the mix of accuracy and stylization I liked!

What I recommend to find a style: I basically ended up with my style subconsciously as an intersection between the things I like to see in art + the things I like to draw! Most of my inspiration comes from anime (😔) and artists online. I'll see a very specific stylization I like in others' art, and try replicating it to see if I like how it fits with my style + if I enjoy drawing it in that way. I did this a lot over the years, accumulating into a big mosaic of inspiration from all the artists whose work I personally enjoy and learn from! I know this isn't exactly answering how to get a style like mine, but I think knowing this general process may help you out in the long run!

ahh i think that's it! i tried to be as comprehensive as i could without being too verbose (my bane). i hope this is the answer you were looking for and that it can help you! 💞 and thank u for the ask! it was a good exercise for myself to analyze my own art

[glavilio]

my friend may i ask what brushes you use 👁

sure! i use procreate and most of my brushes are super customized but i can describe them enough to recreate in any program (hopefully). this is gonna be a little bit long because i'm bored and i love talking about this stuff soooo

the brush i use most often is a medium hard airbrush. with lots of size pressure but very little opacity pressure. it's super versatile and i usually use it to sketch digitally (which i only do sometimes, most of the time i just scan in pencil drawings or go straight to paint)

my main brush for painting is a rectangle brush with a stamp hue jitter and a bit of texture on the sides. i love square brushes for blocking out shapes and it's good for making a base you can put more detail on top of, but it works on it own as well. the main thing with square brushes is i never turn on pressure settings for anything, i find they get in the way when working on the base of a painting so i keep the brush a consistent size and full opacity. the stranger painting only uses the hard airbrush and this square brush:

i also like using it to fill in space in more line-art heavy drawings

for lineart i sometimes use a very hard pencil brush with heavy line weight and no opacity settings. i'm not exactly sure how to make them but pencil brushes are really easy to find online for csp/photoshop/krita/etc. just grab any one and turn on a little bit of smudging and mess with the settings until it feels right. i use it to give my lineart a bit of texture, especially when there's not much else in the artwork for fill that role. here's an example where i used this pencil brush for most of the lineart, particularly on the figure:

the rest of it was either filled in with the lasso selection tool or a version of the square brush i mentioned earlier, you can see it pretty clearly on the border and around the speech bubbles.

this isn't really about a brush in particular but more about how i use them (i always got frustrated with brush packs that couldn't replicate what the artist did and i couldn't figure out why so i'm including this aside to try and avoid that because younger me would kill me if i didn't). i approach lineart more like painting: i first lay down a base layer which is usually overdone and then carve out my lines using an eraser with the same texture as my line brush. i've found when you do that it makes it easier to experiment and allows you to use textures in a more interesting way, as well as mess around with textures that might not be feasible with one-pass-lineart. nothing against it ofc but once i started doing this digital art fully clicked for me. the best example i can think of is this bouquet from my werewolf kiss drawing where i first went in with the black silhouette and then drew in some detail with white, then again went and refined the form with black

speaking of i have another lineart brush i used in the drawing above. it's called mercury on procreate and i don't really know how exactly it works but it's like a very hard airbrush with a lot of texture on the edge and i turned the size pressure settings to the max. it's a little similar to a watercolor brush with no opacity settings. i use it for drawings where i want a more rounded form on the lines and for details in my paintings sometimes

anyway the only other brush i use is just called "oil paint" on procreate. it's a little hard to describe but i'm fairly sure most art programs have a version of it. it's a heavily textured brush with a ton of smudge on it but very little opacity settings. in my paintings i like to lay down a base using an airbrush, build up texture and color using my square brush, and then finish everything off with the oil paint brush. here's a speedpaint that shows it