#nixmori

The reference:

If anyone has a link to the person who originally shared this, please reply! It was so long ago I couldn’t find it.

The timelapse:

The colors are a little different because Glaze/Nightshade have terrible color fidelity.

I wanted to share this timelapse with those who are interested because this ended up being very ingesting practice. The body positions in the reference are obscured by lighting and costume, so I had to try and guess how their bodies were positioned based on the pose we can see. I don’t know if I got it right, but I think my results at least look natural.

This has been kind of an evolution from a bunch of sketches I’ve been working on lately where I focus less on anatomical accuracy in favor of flow and expression. I feel I’ve finally been breaking through a few bad habits I’ve had in my art, where everything becomes a bit stiff looking because I’m too focused on making everything “perfect.” So I’ve loosened up a bit and I think my art has too.

Not much to tell on the process of this one! The pose was inspired by the dance scene between Emma and Mr Knightly from the 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. My Rook (Laelia) is heavily inspired by Jane Austen’s ladies, so it felt right.

The biggest hurdle with this illustration was the filigree background. I hid the figure sketches and drew the whole thing to make sure everything was logically laid out. I occasionally enabled the figures to make sure it complemented them and didn’t overpower them. It was definitely a balancing act! Once I was done with one side, I duplicated it and flipped it. Work smarter, not harder! Still took ages though lol.

Little bonus! You’d never know there was a heart behind them, would you? :)

So, this one was quite different for me, technique-wise. Very experimental and I think it paid off. I essentially did everything in three layers first: a midtones layer, shadows, and highlights. For the background, I pretty much left those layers as I made them, with some minimal cleanup, alpha locked the layers, and then painted those locked layers with a focus only on lighting.

It was surprisingly fast to do (not that I didn’t still spent a couple months picking away at this.) And I think the result ended up better than if I had sat there and painstakingly detailed the whole thing.

I initially painted Emmrich and Rook in the way I normally do (layer for skin, layer for hair, layer for clothes, etc, and detailing each individually. But when I finished all that, I realized the foreground didn’t mesh well with the background. The lighting was wrong and it clashed stylistically. Even though it had taken ages, I decided to “kill my darlings” and painted over them with… yes, three layers: shadows, midtones, and highlights.

Once I was finished with that step, focusing only on simplified shapes, I then merged the three layers and painted details directly onto to layer. So they ended up just being one layer. Once I did that, I was able to step back and focus more on shape language than on small details, adding on only the necessary small details towards the end and I was *much* happier with it.

Is it perfect? No. But I learned more from this piece than probably any other thing I’ve worked on in the last few years and that was very gratifying.