Backer Exclusive- Lofi Girl- Process Blog (Patreon)

I received a request on Youtube to show the drawing and painting process for the Kara Lofi Girl illustration!  I didn't record the sketching process, but I'll try to walk yall through my sketching and development process.

Every illustration starts out with a really basic thumbnail sketch.  The goal isn't to look good, but to capture the idea.  I often heavily rely on both sketching and written notes for these thumbnails.

After scanning the sketch, I sketch in the background in Photoshop.  It's also very loose.  I prefer to do refinement digitally because its really easy to adjust things- resize, move around, or even delete.

I also like that I can adjust the opacity, to make it easier to clean things up and rework things.  I lowered the opacity on the background, and began refining Kara's pose using a modified stick figure.

Once I have a pose I like, I refine the figure using constructive anatomy.

From there, it's a matter of adding details- sketching in the hair and clothes, adding more details to the background.  Just like with watercolor painting, I prefer to work from loose and generic to tight and specific.

As I add more layers and refine things, I group things into folders and bump down the opacity to make drawing on top of them easier and cleaning things up.  

When I have a finished sketch I like, I knock the opacity on all the sketch layers down to like 20, convert to Grayscale, adjust the curves so that it's a black and white image, and then change the color mode to a modified Duotone (bluelines) and print that out onto watercolor paper.

From there, I pencil the illustration, both to make slight adjustments, add more details, and to make the image permanent.  Then I stretch it, removing most of the blue printer dye, leaving just the penciled image.  From there, it's as you can see in the tutorial video.

For this illustration, it was essential that I capture that light and shading, so I spent a lot of time developing the atmospheric lighting through the use of a spotlight (yellow, from the flashlight) and a granulating Daniel Smith Moonshadow.

I spent several layers develping this color and contrast, because I knew it'd be much more challenging to develop it later in the illustration. 

Once I'm satisfied with the underpainting, I start blocking in local color.  Generally, I start in the background, and much like with sketching, I start with large areas and work smaller.

Although the lighting in this illustration is darker, I wanted it to still feel colorful- sort of like Howl's bedroom in Howl's Moving Castle.  I really wanted to give the impression of an artist calmly making art, surrounded by their favorite supplies.

Often with Kara illustrations, I'll paint most of the surrounding illustration before starting in on Kara.  This is for a couple reasons- if it isn't a comic page, I'm generally more flexible with what Kara's wearing and will use that to offset the background, and since her hair is so dark, I'll usualy save that til later so the color doesn't reactivate and bleed into washes.

Once you've been painting watercolor illustrations for a while, you'll start to develop a feel for when you can't really do much more with watercolor and need to turn to gouache or watercolor pencils for further refinement.  Watercolor pencils can be great for adding details or adjusting things- adding a layer of shadow without reactivating the watercolor, adding some light, or adjusting the color.

If you guys ever want a tutorial written up or explained a bit differently, let me know!  I'm happy to write explanations here on Patreon.