oof yeet

Now, to be clear I am not dissing anyone who likes the anime or who thinks the anime did this scene well. I'm actually really happy there are people who like this scene because the poor poor animators for MAPPA deserve all the love they can get. The anime moved beautifully and it was animated so well with a great focus on individuality and fluidity. This scene just didn't hold up to what I wanted.

tldr; You're totes fine to like this scene in the anime, I'm not dissing the animators (they deserve love and affection and a smooch on their head), I just expected something different. Please enjoy the process for this piece!

One of the first things I did before I even started sketching was break down the things I liked and didn't like from the anime and manga.

I decided to do a redraw of the anime rather than the manga, but used my favorite things from the manga art while keeping the formatting of the anime.

^This was my first initial sketch. Basically a thumbnail to get proportions set up and move to a tighter sketch.

^The tight sketch was done on a midtone gray canvas because I was going to be painting this piece, which means I needed a true neutral to gage the values. I tend to paint primarily in black and white, and usually I paint on 1-2 layers (with other layers being used to make certain spots darker before being merged onto the main painting layer). I usually lay down basic values for everything underneath the sketch layer, merge those two layer, then start painting from there.

^This is what the black and white painting looks prior to coloring. The whole painting is completely rendered through this method so that I can accurately gage the shading and make it as dramatic as I need to. This is the longest part of the process and took me forever because I kept goofin the eyes real bad (Imagine her...but cross eyed 😳)

^The entire grayscale painting is then colored with a gradient map (which is extremely useful and allowed me to experiment with lots of different color variations before settling on this one). If you're familiar with oil painting, this is actually really similar to how people did classical paintings (i.e. doing a detailed underpainting then adding in hue with translucent layers of colorful glazes). I really liked how this looked point blank without anything else, but I didn't like how the readability of some of the shadows were lost because of how dark the piece was. Also, It looks like a gradient map. There is now subtle hue shift, and Makima herself looks really flat compared to the grayscale version. The color on her cheeks is the same color as the train behind her...That's not great.

^This is what the final version looks like with me playing the curves tool (which allowed me to push the brights and the darks so the piece is more legible), adding hue variation to her hair, skin, eyes, and subtle background things, and final touches to the actual drawing itself (I had to go back in with the green hue in the shadows and add those back into her hair because they were completely gone when I made her hair pink).

^This is a really good comparison to show side-by-side the way a few adjustments can change a piece. Ngl I still really REALLY like the initially gradient map (the red eyes amid the green of her skin and the background is cool), but I'm glad I did the final touches, just to make it look less like a gradient mapped piece.