A bit of a journey (Patreon)

Stepping back after two days of struggling with just Monique's shading... and it might be some of my best work. It's exhausting, I want it to be DONE, and yet I don't think I've ever shaded anything quite as well as this.

At the start, it felt as though I'd forgotten everything I knew about shading. I knew how to do it on a technical level, but it just wasn't coming together. Blocking the shading in Sketchbook Pro felt like something that I'd been missing, but hasn't helped to speed up my process in Illustrator. If anything, it showed me that painting could be much quicker than vector objects - less than an hour per character, vs several hours!

Since I'm learning a some new techniques on this one, I'm tempted to document them in case I forget again. I've been feeling the warning signs of burn-out, and have been planning to take a break and focus on 3D for a while, but it would be a shame to lose these techniques that I've been figuring out. I might not step away from 2D completely, though - that planned break could be an excuse to explore Clip Studio Paint more thoroughly, to see if that could be more comfortable to use.