February goodie bag print and the process (Patreon)

Hi guys!It has been quite a process to get this one done! I looked back at the previous year with the Valentine's in Hell theme and warmed up with some related doodles~ My goal was to potentially find a good composition for a print in which Filip would be sandwiched by two glory hole walls like in the short tease comic here. It wasn't an easy task but it surely got my brain going.

The problem was that I couldn't find a good way to put all the imps AND the Demon Lord in a satisfying enough way that would serve the composition. So I started thumbnailing to figure out some other possibilities.

In the end I've decided to go with the more abstract one where all of the hands of the Imps and the Demon Lord are reaching to Filip as a subtle foreshadowing of what's to come.

I got to the rendering but stopped mid way since I realized that the direction of the lines was not serving the composition. I didn't like the pose Filip turned to be in and the ropes were not fully supporting the flow I aimed for. Back to the sketching I went to figure out all of those issues.

With all of the issues addressed I started rendering again with a much more satisfying result. All of the lines shading the arms of the Imps and the Demon Lord were pointing into the center of the composition, serving it much better than the shading I used before which went around the forms. The ropes finally followed the lifted silhouette of Filip and supported the tilt of the rib cage. As much as I loved the pull on the nipple chain from the previous version, I felt like it was lopsiding the composition, so this time I followed the line of the rope going down his armpit and the edge between his ribs and the clothing. Putting the chain in such a nice company of soft rounded shapes made much more sense.

The final edited version is slightly darker to put more contrast between the hands and Filip's body~

With this one finished I wanted to start working on the sticker ideas, but before I could do that - I needed to warm up to the Demon Lord's design again~ And with these sketches comes a bunch of comments from my little inner quality control self who's always on a lookout for poses that are too stiff 😅

With all that I'm back to figuring out what to put on the Demon Lord sticker~ Talk to you soon!