This image is for the book I’m doing with my friend, the most excel­lent Nubby Twiglet.

I am draw­ing based off her pho­toref­er­ence, and She is doing lay­out for the book.

Step One: Outlines.

Most of this was pretty sim­ple, but I had a hard time with the neck­lace. I wanted the lines to look really clean so it would come across as plas­tic more convincingly.

Step two — Rudi­men­tary coloring.

Flat col­or­ing, with a lit­tle ink spat­ter to make it look more organic. I do all my work dig­i­tally, so I often try to work in ele­ments of the hand-drawn to give the image more life.

Step three — Shadows

This was many hours of build­ing up shad­ing. ugh. This was one of the first images I did using the pres­sure sen­si­tiv­ity on my tablet to con­trol the opac­ity of my brush strokes. It’s really, really easy for this col­or­ing method to look super-digital in a way I don’t like at all, so I usu­ally take a really long time. I’m really happy with the shad­ows on the mouth.

Step four — Highlights.

Only minor changes on the skin tone, but the lip­gloss is much improved.

Step 5 — Final Touches.

The orig­i­nal pho­toref­er­ence nubby gave me just had a black back­ground, but I decided that it needed a lit­tle some­thing so I drew some strands of hair in. I added a lit­tle more ink spat­ter, this time in grey, to break up the background.

& that’s it!

xoxo,
Star