#paper effect

Hello @4am-bangtan ♥ thank you for liking my art! (っ*´∀｀*)っI use different techniques for different images, so just let me know if there’s any drawing you’re interested in particular. Imma just explain my workflow on this one :)

I used to smash a paper texture onto my drawing as the very last step once the piece was finished, but I feel like you can always tell it’s just a digital piece with paper texture on top. As of recently I like to actually start out with the paper - imitating a traditional workflow.

So I took a photo of a piece of paper and edited the contrast a bit so the structure of the paper is more obvious and there were no visible shadows or gradients on the paper.

This is my background layer. I drew the sketch and then outline on top of it, using a fitting brush that mimics traditional media. In this case a runny inking pen.

Now there’s many different techniques to colour you work. Most of the times I combine several, since each one has its pros and cons.

50% OPACITY

This one is easy. You set your colouring layer to 50% of opacity, so 50% of the texture layer underneath is going to shine through.

CON: This doesn’t look too realistic.

MULTIPLY

You adjust the “blending mode” of your colour layer to “Multiply“, to make it blend with the paper texture underneath and make it shine through. If you don’t know what blending layers are, I strongly recommend you looking them up :) They’re super useful. Multiply darkens the underlying layers, it works a bit like adding a tinted foil on top of your drawing.

CON: Colours come out darker than you expect, picking the right colours gets some time getting used to. The colours turn out not as saturated and a bit dirty looking.

HARD LIGHT

Hard light is an alternative blending mode you may use. Colours appear nicely vibrant with this one.

CON: It’s very hard to predict what your picked colour is going to look like, since this blending mode strengthens contrast and vibrancy. It’s just a hassle to use.

TINTED

This one is the most realistic looking and easiest to control. You create a so called “adjustment layers” (you got these in photoshop), that can edit the colour of what you see below. So to achieve the skin colour I “colored” everything seen underneath into a light pinkish colour. I feel like this one looks the most natural.

CON: You need to create a new adjustment layer for each colour. It’s a bit more work and if you’ve got many colours, it gets hard to tell which layer is what :D

Okay now to the last step: Again, pick some nice brush that mimics a traditional media and paint away with your prefered colouring method. I picked a copic here and used the tinted method. Then I duplicated the layer for some added effect ♥

Looks pretty convining, right? 😜