You have such a unique style, what is your process?
First off, thank you!
Secondly, hope you're ready for a large breakdown because I've got a lot to say.
I've actually been playing around with my style more recently in part because of how hard the details can be on my wrists- so this is slightly outdated, but the jist of my typical art style is as follows:
I kind of treat line art the same way I do painterly rendering.
For my sketch I use a mapping pen with high variable pressure to get a rough idea of what I want to finalize.
I'll also often have a color pass, particularly if I have certain elements that I don't want to be lined in order to account for them ahead of time, such as with the "intestines" of my oc Forget-Me-Not; or if I'm building something as part of a larger scene/layout.
After that, I genuinely do my final lines on the same layer as my sketch, carving out details through erasing and refining the original.
Sometimes I'll also break up elements from the sketch across layers- that way I can use 'backups' of the element if I don't like the direction I took the lines. Or if I'm intending to duplicate a particular element, like in this case of the wings from Forget-Me-Not.
From then on its just rinse and repeat until I finish things up! The detail work can be near Sisyphean at times, but I often get into a flow state that makes it fun for me.
All of my detail work actually comes down to a few simple repeated patterns.
For black spots I tend to black out the area and then erase distinct places to fill in with detail later,
Said detail always ends up being some variation of this pattern I make by hand of swirls, lines, and dots I then use to break up the transitions between them.
Often, I'll use the liquify tool as a starting point for this because the squiggles it makes are fun to play with.
I'll also sometimes erase bits and pieces of these before going back in and re-lining those areas.
Most of the time I try to have these greebled details have a 'flow' of movement which fits the shape its meant to be a part of. Which is easiest to see in how I render hair.
My colors, though changing as of recent (which I'll get more into in the next section) are relatively simple.
Most of the time I start with flats that have slight gradient variations in them.
Then I mess around with the line art color and adding a chromatic abberation by using screen layer duplicates of my image, and separating the R, G, and B, instances of them. Of which I tend to push things around slightly with the liquify tool for my desired effect.
Alternatively, I'll mess around with layer modes that have random splotches of color I make with a textured brush before merging and posterizing the combined image. Then I mess around with gradient maps on top of it until I've toyed with things to a point where I like the final result.
As for my more recent style tests, particularly in what I was doing during arfight. I've been mainly experimenting in trying to figure out my forms and colors more.
This test had me use a far more typical sketch to line process before coloring in monochrome, shading the values, and then attempting to do my lined detail work as rendering on top of them before adding a gradient map on top of that and messing a bit with the colors after the fact.
This is a LOT easier on my wrists, but im not quite happy with how it looks yet. I plan to play with things more until I reach a happy medium, but that's something to work on after I do my anatomy studies.
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