SKELETON FOLK REDRAW - process and final (Patreon)

Hello guys hehe haw haw. This is a VERY LATE process post of my skeleton drawing. It is a redraw of this drawin:

This is really a flesh.png classic, but! I personally don't REALLY like it. Too many limbs going on in the middle and the left two characters are in the same position basically and also the anatomy is TOO crazy for me. I do it crazy as it is... this is too far. That being said I do like the hair and its entirely possible I was going to add hair to my new one and forgot. But let's get into the process.

It started with me just trying to get the composition and poses of all the people right. For those who are curious about how I do my compositions, I wanted this one to have the weight more evenly spaced out (no entanglement of arms in the center). For each specific person, I NEEDED the silhouettes to be clear and easy to understand. Not too much overlapping. I tried to have the legs independent and at least one arm. Also, it was important that the bones were clear to read. I tried to not have too much overlap. The hands gave me trouble because there's so many dang bones. For the bottom one I purposely left out the other side of the arm lol I just didn't want to deal with that mess.

Here is the earliest stage I have a picture of:

So this is how it started out, NO bone reference. No nothing reference. Just messy to get the idea down. I actually shape out the bodies BEFORE the skeletal systems. Then after I had a better idea of the skeletons I went back and shaped the bodies a little better around them.

Moving on, here is a photo of it when I was drawing the bones.

I sketched the skeletons using reference (the dark red and black lines) and then I lowered the opacity perhaps or on top of it I used a bigger brush to map out where the bones went. I found it much easier to "paint" the bones rather than outline all of the bones in lineart. It gets way too confusing and is needlessly difficult to lineart first. I drew the bones with different shades of white to not only add interest but also help me differentiate the different layers.

I originally wanted the bones to just be one color (in this case, many different shades of one color), like the original. This is an example:

But I found that it was way too flat with the flat flesh colors and the background too. And I ended up liking the previous stage with the messy sketch layer on top too. So I decided to add a layer of lineart on top of the bones. Here is a photo of just the lineart.

It was really easy to do the lineart now that I had the skeletons mapped out so clearly. It is mostly completely outline-based with little to no shading, and filled in black to show the back of the ribs and some pelvic shadows. This lineart is solid red, but in the final drawing, it is actually multicolored! The slightly different shades of everything makes it much more fun.

Thats all for now..sticker club coming soon!!!