LizJOwen

So I’m actually doing two things at once here. First off is my “birthday card” idea aimed at younger girls (possibly around 10 yo). I wanted to lean on the more anime style, but with a hint of realism.

And I’m working on this piece as well:

I wanted to re-do my old piece “Hello Kitty Nya” to see how much I’ve developed over the years… When I finish it, I shall post them both alongside each other to compare them both. 

Guess that’s all for now!

It’s a habit of mine to take some screenshots in the duration of my work - thanks to doing this all of the time at uni - so I thought I’d make a post of them all! I used Paint Tool Sai for painting it.

1. First off I took a picture of my line art and brought it up on Paint Tool sai. Now I haven’t got any screenshots of my lineart process but I shall describe it to you; I made it so that the lineart sketch layer was set to multiply, and created a new Vector layer and by using a mixture of the Curves and the Pen tool I traced around my sketch. Once done I hid my sketch layer. 

2. I created a new layer for each section I was going to paint e.g. one for the skin layer, and another for the flames layer. I used a hard brush for painting these with no blending as I wanted to create that hard look by adjusting the opacity of the brush. It was a new technique to me, and I really liked it.

3. Here you can see all of the layers I created, and now I begun to work on the hair. I wanted her to have the same fiery character as the flames she’s rising from so I chose a red. All of my painting is a bit messy as I like to erase it after I have covered the whole area.

4. After taking a break - I took one every 2 hours - I zoomed in and realised that I needed to fix the hand a little after looking at my reference image. I created a new line art layer and began to fix this, making the original lineart at a lower opacity so that I didn’t get confused. I first did this quite messy with the pen tool, and then later used the curved tool once I was satisfied.

5. I then painted and shaded the hand now that I had worked on the lineart.

5. I went back to the Hair layer to resume painting it. Now that I have painted the whole area I locked the layer and began to add some dark strands for the hair. I added some shading as well, adjusting the opacity of the brush as well as the colours I used. This was then where I used a minimal amount of the blend tool just so that the strands were connected more smoothly.

6. I zoomed in on the fan as someone wasn’t quite right with it, and fixed it up on a new lineart layer, following the same method as I did with the hand although only using the line tool.

7. The main colouring section is almost complete, now before I did the shading of the fan I decided to first move onto the background and the flames.

8. I roughly coloured the flames and the smoke, choosing a dark red for the background because I thought that black would be too “strong” for this piece. I created two new layers above all of the others - Shadow and Lighting - and used an orange/yellow for the reflections of the flames, and a deep blue for the shadows.

9. I zoomed in to each section to then clean up the rough reflections and shadows so that they were more accurate, also fixing the coloured layers along the way.

10. And then I was done! I did a lot of fixing along the way such as changing her lips, and I also changed the lineart colours to match the colours more i.e. the colour of the lines around the skin would be a skintone colour. Tada! 

I hope you enjoyed reading this process, and I hope to do more in my upcoming posts! Just need to do more work~

Lizzie.