Illustration #92 (Patreon)

I've been playing around with some ideas about how demons are created, and that maybe they're not only born, but that other races, like humans and elves, can be transformed into demons. Maybe fully and permanently, but also temporarily or only partially. It could be a fun way to enable some cool character designs and situations! So here's a demon girl enjoying the results of a partial transformation.

I intended to try to make a picture that was a bit simpler than this, but I was having fun with this one, so I ended up doing a bit more with it. 😅 I hope you like it!

Here are the links for the extra content for this illustration:WIP images   Short time lapse (44m)   Long time lapse (7h 18m)   PSD files 

If you're looking through the process of this illustration, you'll notice that I attempted a workflow, but pivoted away from it pretty quickly. After having tried a few different approaches recently, I have to say I feel a lot more comfortable with the approach I've used in the past where I do a lot of the work in greyscale and then add colors gradually using Hard Light and Soft Light layers.

I did some experiments trying to find better blending modes that would more accurately represent how light works (as you could see in #91 for example), but from what I can tell based on those experiments, none of the blending modes provide a simple way to accurately represent the behavior of light and shadows. It seems to be down to how the math of blending modes change colors and values linearly, while actual light doesn't change them linearly.

Because there is no simple and fully accurate way (that I know of) to represent the behavior of light with blending modes, I feel like it might be best to accept that things aren't accurate, and instead just try to make it look nice in a stylized way. So I'll probably do that going forward. Illustrations #82 and #85 are good examples of the type of workflow I feel comfortable with and that gives results I enjoy. You can check out their workflows in the gallery post if you're curious about them.

Thank you for supporting me this past month! I've got some more sketches and pictures coming up, and I still want to see if I can find a simpler style I can sometimes use for quicker work, so I'd like to play around with that a bit more and see what happens.