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Line Art

This piece was mainly meant to be rendering practice, and as part of that, stop spending so much time fussing over line art (which i am still very guilty of doing)

Initial sketch (left) to get the general composition down, and then some additional guidelines to help with hair and clothes (right).

Line art (left), normally I spend a lot more time polishing and refining this, or straight up doing yet another line layer on top, but I've recently just started leaving it in its sketch-y state, and doing some erasing to clean up over extended or messy lines.

Then using a fill tool to block out the character (right), and fill in any gaps with a brush. The main purpose of this is so I can use Alpha Lock to avoid going over the lines during painting.

Some really interesting resources (and interesting art channels) that I've been using as a reference point:

(that last one has english subtitles btw, bless you based naoki saito dragalia artist)

(left) Changing the base colour to brown helps with gaps while painting skin, and changing the background colour to a neutral tone helps with balancing contrast. (right) Afterwards, I start blocking out the individual pieces with various colours so its easy to tell what I have or haven't missed.

Once colours are down, slap some shading in with hue shifting to spice up the colour variety. I don't know what the non-pixel art term for this is, but basically it's when you make the colour change hue and saturation as it darkens. Here's an example of the scarf, without hue shifting on the left, and with on the right:

Since each section of the image is its own layer, the colours can be adjusted until everything looks good. This is usually where I do that technique where you put a grey layer over the image and setting the Blend Mode to Color. This makes the image greyscale, so luminosity/contrast can be adjusted for readability (combined with eye squinting to see how easy it is to distinguish important image elements).

After that's done, the real change that makes the piece less harsh is to alpha lock the line layer, then start painting over it with colours that match the surroundings.

Here's also where I make small touch ups, like remembering to colour the rest of the hair and shorts, and doing that thing where the face has a soft skin glow that affects the surrounding hair.

Here's the fun part where I put a bacground in, otherwise known as throwing random colours around and seeing what sticks. I wanted try my hand at the cool brush stroke outline effect, which basically involved painting outlines between layers that sit on top of each other, such as between the palm of the hand and arm, or the back shoulder and the hair. Also random cat paws and sparkles for good measure.

Some cheeky Ben Day (aka comic book / manga) dots over areas where light might shine and create bloom. Into the spider-verse does this and it looks awesome.

Finally, air brushing some colours over the top on a layer with Soft Light blend mode. It's not readily apparent when isolated, but if I greyscale the image and then apply the layer it gives a dream-like effect

This video by OyunOrka quite succinctly goes over a bunch of things that can be done here, but obv don't have to do all of them.