Process- Halloween Moka (Patreon)

The main image is the scan of the finished version!

As it has become tradition for traditional pieces, I draw it out digitally, print it out and then ink it through the light mat. Nothing out of the ordinary here!

Since I have to work with whatever colors I have on hand, I make a sketch of it again to test out palette.

Problems immediately arose the moment I started to actually paint over the inks lol... Something about it just looked off to me, and when comparing it to the sketch from up above I noticed a few but noticeable differences:

The inked pose honestly feels a bit more on the stiff side? It doesn't feel as playful as the other sketch.... And the whole point of using watercolor is to get the textures of the paint, but the gradients turned out too smooth. I was using a different type of paper, a much fancier one, but in the end the cheap Canson Mixed Media ended up providing what I was looking for.

I also thought that the black inks weren't really doing the drawing any favors. Inking is tricky, I enjoy it a lot but I don't think I'm good enough to actually make said black linework blend well with the colors... I feel like it usually brings the tones down, looking a bit muddy.

With all these issues I had with it, I decided to scrap it relatively early on. I was liking how her skin was looking! But everything else I wasn't into lol.

Instead of using black ink, this time I used colored lead pencils, starting out with a nice pink and then enhancing it with blues.

I already was liking it a whoooole lot more lol, it's much more vibrant and playful feeling now. Scrapping things is good!

I colored some of her skin with Copic markers. I wanted a smoother finish for it, so I decided against watercolors, they are a bit tricky to control in terms of both tone and texture... Markers are much safer.

The background and almost everything else was watercolor however, I wanted that texture!

And just like that she was almost complete! With colored leads and markers I made further adjustments.

We ended up with the version I posted yesterday. I mentioned that I was going to touch it up further because I wanted to experiment with something...

I wanted to add starts to the background! Usually I would just randomly put little dots with a white marker or a brush, but it really never gives out that spontaneous effect that I would prefer to have.

During my stay in Japan (mandatory mention of it I know....) I got to see a few manga exhibits, and realized that the way those artists do it is just but flicking brushes/toothbrushes with white paint! I was a bit mindblown by it lol, seems so obvious in retrospective. I wanted to try it out myself. The scrapped drawing ended up being a good test for it, so then I prepared the real one to be splashed on...

I don't have a liquid masking, so I had to manually tape her to cover the parts I didn't want to paint over. But after a few flicks of the brush she would be complete! Only a matter of getting rid of the tape....

And of course, the tape got rid of some of her hair lol... Thankfully it was an easy fix since the paper wasn't too damaged. If it had been on her face I would have been very upset... The drawing is relatively small, so it would have been more challenging to tweak.

But after going over the entire drawing once more for final adjustments I could finally call it done! The splattered paint is more noticeable in person. The unfortunate drawback of traditional... You really can't fully appreciate it unless you see it in person! But I'm happy with it regardless.

I have mentioned it before but I do think that for the near future any personal work will be done traditionally... It's both relaxing and much less time consuming to digital.