working on ocs and comms

My commissions are open again!!

well this i gonna be a long ass answer!! but bare with me

first of all i set a pureref up with everything i might need to make it happen, for the hades wonder woman piece it means:

reference from the absolute wonder woman comics (concepts and comic screenshots to figure out outfit, poses, items etc)

reference from the hades game (to figure out rendering and how to translate what i already have from the comics into the hades universe)

more specifically, apollo is here for hair reference, nemesis for color matching and armour render (same as athena), the furies mostly bc of the whip and theseus and the minotaur for lighting and muscle ref.

all these things help inform how to start the piece, so i know what to look for.

🖍 here's a little visual representation of how i do things!

SKETCHING: for the sketch i first did a simple study of nemesis' body so that i had an understanding of how the hades' bodies work (also bc it was the closest body type to what i wanted for wonder woman). then i moved the body to a different pose, added the absolute ww outfit. after that i figured how i wanted to render each piece of clothing. then i (re)did the hair do get a better idea of volume (using the outline tool) and by then i had figure out how the lineart would go! (that's also the moment i made an artistic choice of not making the tattoos part of the lineart, which cost me the Whole tattoos bc when it was time to color i completely forgot about them,,,,,,,,,,,)

🖍 now for rendering:

PIC 1: i usually organize layers by color instead of naming it! i think it makes it easier and faster to understand what each color means. black usually means lines, yellow or light green special effects (usually on top of everything, so the layer hierarchy also helps figuring out what is what), and red for general coloring or flats. here i colored it differently so that each layer color is actually the color that is on that layer. so all red is in the red layer, all silver in silver layer etc...

for rendering i kept looking back and forth between my hades references and my final product and ngl it was really hard for some time (i almost completely scratched the idea for this piece and moved on). when looking at my refs i was making sure to add the right amount of "color jitter" and also a bit of colored highlights on the armour pieces already (which is something that i usually do later).

PIC 2: *the reason the lasso has its own group of layers all together is because i actually made it with the outline tool! so it behaves a little different when coloring it. but besides that, its the same process.

PIC 3: now for finishing touches i added (what was supposed to be) a temporary hades background so that it could inform me on how to do the highlights and make it look appealing. these colors are highly saturated and they keep changing from one color to another all the time so i tried my best to mimic that but also not overdo it.

"suffering sappho!"