How I make art! (Patreon)

Hey y'all! Been a bit absent here, but hopefully this will end soon. In an effort to end the drought here, I decided to post some of my studies and my workflow to get my art to look like what you see c:

A bit of my efforts first, you can skip this since it's just needless exposition x3
A lot of you might know I struggle with making my art process faster, so I have been looking for many avenues to get to that (except generative AI, I love art too much to outsource my effort to this shit).
This struggle is not just true for art, it extends to my whole living! Ever since I can remember, I take too long on many tasks, which took away time I wanted to spend on art. And even my art process was too slow for my liking. Turns out I have ADHD (which I found out when I finally decided to go to the doctor after trying to speed up my living through many different ways) and now I take meds for that, but that only helps me focus, not necessarily with being faster.
However, I always had in mind that there are people with ADHD who make art super fast, as well as a lot of people who doesn't have ADHD who takes ages on any art piece. So I figured I had to look for what makes those people fast.
I spent countless hours into trying to make my art simpler to render, which I thought would make it faster. But I don't spend too much time rendering when everything goes right, I just lose time remaking things I did not like. So what was it, did I need to lower my standards? Nah, it can't be. My masters (self assigned inspirations, generally the gold standard of art imo) can do beautiful things really fast, so I gotta find out how they do that.
Then I decided to try yet another study regiment, just doing the plain "boring" stuff the masters of art teach:
Doing master studies (basically copying 1:1 your favorite artists or pieces, with your own methods);
Copying real life images (I thought maybe this way I could find out what makes a piece of art believable);
Doing gesture drawing studies (to help loosen my hand and grip while making art);
And experimenting. A lot of experimenting.
I learned that master studies are insane. They helped me understand what makes me like an artwork and made me learn how to put that on my own work. I also learned that gesture drawing made my perspective way more believable, somehow. And I learned I needed to control my values (the brightness or lightness, shading in other words) in a much subtlier way. Looking at my past artworks, it's noticeable how weridly shiny things used to be, to a point where it was too much. Replicating real life pictures actually made me realize how much I needed to control contrasts.

So it all culminated into my most recent sketches and rendering attempts, which I will show here!

First, sketches. Thicker sketch brushes allow me to be messier and my mind to auto-complete details. leave that for when it actually matters later on.

Second, fill out a base layer. We don't need to color the character in right now, just a base for everything to go.

Now, one of the most important parts: on a multiply layer right above the base, I made rough but well thought out lines on places where occlusion would make everything darkest and introduced silouettes on some other parts to make it easier to separate them from the rest of the character, such as the balls lol. The circle represents the exact color I picked for those lines. Note how they can be blurry or textured in some places.

On another multiply layer right below those lines, I filled everything with that first color blotch, then used the colors on the other ones to apply the shading. I configured my color picker to pick only colors from the layer I work with, so even on multiply, I can color pick precisely what I want. Keep contrasts low but enough to make out the shape!
I used these colors because of how skin subtly refracts light. This makes the character feel alive and healthy! If you use grey tones, the character actually looks kinda dead and sick lol

(I was lazy and skipped the soft tail on this one lol)

After that, I added some overlay layers above the shading to make the colors a bit more vibrant, believable or more moody. The color blotches shows the colors I used on those overlays. Feel free to experiment, this part really helps with setting the mood of the artwork and placing the character on a background in a believable way.

Now for one of my favorite parts, soft reflections. With a normal layer with opacity set to 25~30%, I used that color on the botch to paint the reflections. You can later lock the layer's alpha/pixels to change it to another tone matching the background lighting.
I changed the base color of the left character to show something neat: darker base tones are really good at reflecting the environment, but too much would look bad in ways that doesn't happen on lighter tones. This makes me pay more attention to where the reflections should go and how intense they should be (also really handy when making YCHs, since I gotta make everything fit any character's colors)

Now on another layer above, specular reflections. This one was set to normal and around 80% opacity. Those specular lights are addictive to me, so I would often overdo them. Gotta stay humble and try to keep them to mostly thin brush strokes to not go overboard.
Same color as the other reflections, but always feel free to play around.

From here, I just added some final effects to show perspective: a screen layer above everything with really dark blues, using a soft brush, painting around the edges of the characters to make those parts look "further away".
You can go crazy from here and add another multiply above everything, make cast shadows and use another layer type to reiterate the light areas.

Now you know what's really cool? That base layer can be colored acordingly to a character's ref sheet- the shading is all taken care of! This is basically how I do my YCHs.

After seeing some of my masters show their progress pics like this on their own Patreon pages, I thought it would be a cool idea to show mine as well. Maybe this could be helpful for other artists c:

That's it for now, hope you liked seeing how my lil brain works lol
Love you all!!