WOAAAAH hold up. You made a mural, and started with LINE ART FIRST!! I did a mural and I started out with the base coats first then detail + shading aND THEN line art. I almost dIED OF STRESS!!! HOW???? May I ask? I'm curious bc I'm doing a mural for my school and I have yet to know how I'm gonna do this, bc in digital art I always start with line art but....THIS ISNT DIGITAL ART I CANT JUST PRESS CTRL + Z. Is it harder? Is there another easier method to do this? Pls explain your magic 🙏🏻
So, I made two murals for Redbubble. I’d never done it before and I’m mostly a digital artist, so there was definitely some trial-and-error in figuring out a process that worked for me.
I did the first mural the same way as you: by doing base coat, shading, and THEN line art, and I totally agree: IT WAS SUPER STRESSFUL. Here’s some process shots of mural #1:
First, I did a digital mockup.
Then, I used a projector to get the sketch on the wall.
Here’s when I started to add line art.
And here’s a closeup when I added some hilights and detail! Mural #1 was a JOURNEY.
So for Mural #2, I wanted to see if there was a way to speed up the process. An employee at Blick Art Materials suggested doing the lineart first with paint marker because the black line would be so deep and opaque, it would still be visible even if you added paint on top.
Doing this was much more intuitive for me.
Even when I added paint on top of this, I could still see the line underneath. In fact, in some portions, adding the paint on top of the black line created, like, shading.
From there, it was easy to use the black paint marker again to bring out the lines that got too covered by paint.
This mural took me MUCH less time than Mural #1, and it felt a lot more natural and fun this way~
And here’s a pic of both murals after I finished them. (I’ll take a better pic later!!)