#sketch process

June's Mixtape of the Month Cover is coming along ☀️

To preface, I use Ibis paint x on a cell phone.

I do not have a fancy program like procreate or clip studio, or even a tablet and a lot of how I work has evolved from what I have found works the best for drawing on my tiny, little, shitty phone screen.

That being said....

A speed paint video

To begin, I rarely map faces more than just very basic shapes. (Though, I will admit the structures can get more complex the less comfortable I am with drawing the face.) I usually start with a very basic framework that I implement half from just years of practice in drawing faces and becoming more comfortable with those base shapes, as well as the fact that I'm already aware I will inevitably be over using the liquify pen. Now, I would like to say this is a crutch and I just do it because it's easy, but unfortunately it's actually just because I have fat fingers and a tiny screen (sometimes I can place lines better with my pen but it's still a really small surface to work with) and it's just less of a headache to address the lines with liquify than redoing them a million times or zooming in so close that I lose the rest of the picture.

I will often start with faces because they tend to have the most small details. From there, I will then usually shrink the drawing down and place it about where I think it'll need to be to draw the next part, all while less than strategically erasing the piss poor guidelines I had originally given myself.

SOMETIMES I will save my guides of a second layer in case I might need them later, but that's about as far as I ever plan ahead to be honest...

And we can see that in the next part where after scribbling in a few vague marks for their hair I then IMMEDIATELY regret erasing my head guides and hastily sketch them back in so I can proceed to poorly map out their bodies (most of which I will inevitably be covering up anyway, which I KNEW was going to happen with this one and I cursed myself the entire time). I then fill in where I want all the glorious hair, which fills up the rest of the blank space in the art with fun and interesting shapes and conveys the lore of the AU.

After this, and to take this from a sketch to actual lineart, I will clean up some of the lines on a second layer and keep some of the original sketch features where I like them. This helps me keep the life of the original sketch while also allowing me to clean up the more scratchy lines, which usually produces a pretty nice, clean looking line work.

Should I do a lore drop for my AU next??